Some of Moses’s people believe that everyone experiences the Toll, but only the hypersensitive feel it. This is a subset of the subset—most believe that the Toll expresses itself only in the chosen minority. Their advanced evolution does not justify self-pity or self-indulgence; on the contrary, they believe that it demands monastic humility and a tenacious work ethic. It doesn’t justify animosity toward inferior members of the species, either. It demands the purest nonviolence. They have been graced with an extravagant capacity to feel, a conduit to imaginative empathy, and it is their celestial duty to exercise this capacity, never to numb or ignore it. This is their operating philosophy. Moses has heard vegans make similar arguments about the human obligation toward nonhuman animals—if you have been endowed with consciousness, you must instrumentalize it to curtail the damage you inflict on the world—an attitude that Moses finds sympathetic but ultimately absurd. It is draining enough, he thinks, to summon compassion for the nonedible animals of this planet.
Moses remembers what he is about to do to Joan Kowalski and furiously scratches his scalp. No one is perfect. Not even the prophets. Certainly not the geniuses.
Moses accepts messages from those afflicted by the Toll, or those who believe they are afflicted, and offers his council to them. He operates the blog in anonymity, under the name Dr. Malachi. One new message glares in his inbox. Subject: Game of Clue. He clicks. A delightful patina of sweat begins to relieve the Toll for a moment, almost the way the glow does. He eats three olives and makes another drink.
Game of Clue
Dear Dr. Malachi,
I know that your specialty is “The Toll” but nobody else will reply to me, so I am hoping that you will extend your psychiatric expertise to my strange case.
First, let me state that although I am a man, I do not consider myself a product, victim, or perpetrator of “toxic masculinity,” and I harbor no desire to be macho. I was raised by a father who hugged me and encouraged me to draw. He cried in my presence and made all the meals. My mother was an intellectual who often traveled without us, and when she returned, we could tell she had experienced weeks of private revelation, to which we would never be privy, and I found that thrilling. My little sister is my best friend.
In my sexual life, I have always waited for the woman to make the first move, and I do not proceed until she explicitly says she wants us to. I prioritize my wife’s orgasms over my own, and I favor steamy film scenes over pornography, due to ethical concerns about the industry. I prefer for the woman to be on top. My wife is a heroic genius who does not wear makeup or dye her hair, and I defer to her in nearly all life decisions. When the sexual misconduct of a powerful man is revealed on the news, I feel such intense sadness, it makes me fall asleep. I become squeamish when faced with blood and/or the visible suffering of others and have to close my eyes during violent scenes. I am an aspiring vegan. I have attended more feminist marches than my wife has, although, of course, it’s not a competition, and while I’m at it, I might as well add that I am not even remotely competitive. I have never, ever fantasized about harming anyone. Up until now, I have always enjoyed a fair degree of mental health. The mating scenes in nature documentaries depress me tremendously.
I am not aware of any mental illness in my family, aside from one uncle who was bipolar and did eventually shoot himself in the head, but we were nothing alike. My fortieth birthday is approaching, and it’s true that I have some fear about aging, and my sister was redeployed in the winter, which was hard. My parents are both alive and well, and Dad’s been in remission for a year. Work always took up a lot of time, and I don’t get to do as much for my personal betterment as I wish I could (I had hoped to speak fluent Mandarin by now, and I have 39 works of unread nonfiction downloaded on my tablet!), but I enjoy my job and I think our company has a worthwhile mission. I code for a living and recently got a raise. I have a spectacular wife and a close group of friends, who are mostly childless, which makes us feel better. Up until everything went to Hell, I would scope out the artisanal beer scene on Thursday evenings with two buddies from work. They’re younger—all the coworkers my age have kids—and they remind me of what I was like a decade ago. The last beer I tried was an Icelandic sheep-manure-smoked IPA. Not so bad! I also played on a coed soccer team with my wife, and I loved seeing the love of my life kick ass on the field. I’m aware that my body doesn’t move the way it used to, and even small amounts of physical activity now give me muscular hangovers, but it’s important to stay active—helps me hang on to whatever youth I have left. Ha.
Now that I’ve established my normalcy, let me establish my abnormality:
I’ve been experiencing three symptoms lately which I hope you can help me decode. I have a feeling that they’re connected, although maybe they’re not, and the last one is by far the most urgent. It’s very possible that I just have a vitamin deficiency. The first two symptoms feel like clues to help me understand the last, but I am at my wit’s end. I feel both out of my mind and trapped in my head and I am petrified. Please help.
The symptoms, in order of appearance:
1. I have become so afraid of being electrically shocked by a metal handle that I will take any measure, no matter how extreme, to avoid touching one. Recently, I missed the first twenty minutes of a meeting because I couldn’t bring myself to open the door to our building and no one else appeared. It began in the winter with a very light aversion but now if I am forced to touch a metal handle I start to hyperventilate. The last time I got shocked was in March, and I felt the shock—like ghosts of it, repeatedly shocking me—for a week straight. Over and over. And the shock itself wasn’t even bad. But the aftershocks, if you will, were so maddening I could no longer focus at work. I started to experience powerful headaches. Even the headaches felt electric.
2. Shortly after the static-shock-fear set in, I developed a desire to tag surfaces with my name. Walls of parking garages, bathroom stalls, phone cases, park benches, church doors, library books, laptops, restaurant menus, the sailboat of a friend, the interior and exterior of my own car. Even, once, the soccer cleat of a teammate. The desire is loud and physical, almost like the need to sneeze. Sometimes if the desire gets too intense, I have to channel it into sex or it will totally overtake me. I am deeply opposed to the defacement of public property. I have no background in graffiti and was never interested in tagging, but sometimes I wake as if from a dream in the spray-paint aisle of a hardware store, and even though I try to suppress all tagging fantasies, I now know exactly what my tag would look like. All I’ll say is that it would be yellow.
I have only submitted to the desire once, near the community tennis courts. I won’t expose the details, as they are identifying. I am very ashamed of this. Please advise.
This last one is the worst, so bear with me if I stumble through the explanation. I feel sick and shaky as I type.
3. It started at Beth’s fortieth birthday party two months ago. (Beth is what I will call my wife. All names have been changed for reasons that will become clear. IRL, my wife only knows about issue #1—and even that I downplayed.) Beth and I have been married for ten years now, been together for thirteen, and I decided to throw her a surprise party for the first time in her life. She didn’t have any of the hang-ups some people (like me!) have about “crossing the threshold,” or what have you. And she never gets sad about our lack of children. She always thought it would be unethical to create a child who would face environmental doom. And I am so on board with this. I mean, sometimes I do wish I had somebody I could teach chess to, and I find myself smiling at unknown babies, but I agree with Beth—in such a climate, to act on the primal reproductive urge would be selfish.
All in all, Beth is a phenomenal human being and a very understanding/patient/positive partner. She smells like lavender and texts me interesting science articles at lunch. Or at least, she used to, before everything got fucked. So I wanted to make things nice for her fortieth.