As Nero Played The Fiddle

December 2000 | back-issues, fiction

Hysteria. The head has become so steeped in sickness and depravity that it now feasts on the tender, manicured hands that were once used to hold itself up with. This masochistic cannibal is none other than the conservative and charming town of Naperville IL. Metaphorically, much like the urban legend of a young boy who upon rousing after a nights slumber discovers a tiny boil on his neck, as the day progresses the ‘tiny’ boil advances in growth to become a seething, tawny cyst. When the slightest pressure is applied, the fetid contents bursts to the surface to reveal hundreds of pulsating suckling arachnids pouring out of the gaping wound. That’s right, the seemingly flawless pearl among oysters, the ‘Gold Coast’ without the coast, was torn asunder by the writhing inner turmoil of several occurrences, in two months time.

A $90,000 bank heist, a brutal slaying of a disabled mother; a child buried on his seventeenth birthday due to an apparent overdose; a police officer discharges the contents of his fire arm into the center of his head; mother sedates and suffocates her three children; fifth former employee at near dormant Amoco plant dies of brain cancer. These events, if viewed over a five year span, would be no less horrific, but possibly more consumer friendly, more digestible. Your run-of-the-mill SUV navigator is overwhelmed with the complexity of these trespasses into their Faberge egg-like utopia. Much to our misfortune, the chances that a polite FBI agent with slick black hair will pull up on a Harley praising our local diner’s coffee and delectable cherry pie�all the while dreaming of a bow legged dwarf sporting a red tux who enunciate words like he has a mouth filled moist peat moss�has grown slim to none. Still the public needs a rationalized martyr to heave their emotional stones at. The effigies the media are offering, if any, are the mindlessly reiterated bastard offspring of some foul drunken Spock and Freudian copulation. For some in this drive-thru culture these bad seed and postpartum justifications are feasible. Still, close inspection on both individual and a broad sequential scale warrants further speculation that a far more sinister nature lies beneath the pale, livid surface.

For some time the common optimistic and social lethargy inducing phallic has been that children are the ‘Hope of the Future’. This has almost become the self-imposing cliche of the last decade in this century. These futile ignorant ‘opti-mystics’ never entertain the possible scenario that unravels before them at an alarming rate. The youth of Naperville have, over the past five years, under gone a truly consternatious metamorphosis. The adolescences have amassed into hoards of heathenish Philistines with fiber optic IVs and accomplish nothing more than acts of pillaging, massacring, and senseless procreation. In comparison, their cranial capacity is sub-par even to the most asinine mongoloid. Adjoined to their mass ingestion of whatever squalid bathtub pharmaceutical they can get their deviant hands on, they are utterly drained of any instilled morality and social decency.

No less than two years after Naperville is hailed by numerous forms of the mass media as the “greatest place in the United States to raise a child” does the sugar coating crumble and the decayed cavity of reality occupy its place. Shortly after these accolades are betrothed, the ‘ideal’ children venture outside their Eden-like playpens to make daily Meccas to Cicero Av. and other such tributaries. There the ‘well adjusted’ babes develop an insatiable lust for heroin and its ugly stepsister, crack. The ‘child friendly’ town’s solution? To run a week long, hard-hitting expose in the Naperville Sun on degenerate teen junkies from the suburbs surrounding Naperville. Having thought this placebo cured the plague the expose is praised. Thereupon, little less than a month later, a child was nestled beneath six feet of soil on his seventeenth birthday, due to an apparent overdose. This in fact was not the direct cause of death, the heroin he snorted late at night a few days before his funeral had been cut with powder Clorox bleach, causing his heart to explode.

A few days prior to this ‘mishap’, a disabled, middle-aged woman is brutally murdered and is left in her bathtub. The culprits? Three eighteen year olds, two male, one female. The female was the expired’s trusted caretaker. While two of the associates ransacked the meager living quarters, one of them brutishly torqued the handicapped woman’s cranium back forth until her brittle upper vertebra shattered. During the groups’ appearance in court to enter a feeble plea of not guilty to the charge of premeditated first degree murder, the demented girl looked only once, to give a wide tooth grin at her parents.

In the following week a gang of eight youths stage a bank heist, under the nurturing guidance of a pathetic swindler who is employed with these Tarintino refuse. The young entrepreneurs make off with $90,000 and proceed to spend it on inane tripe such as jewelry and electronics, a shimmering reflection on the spending pattern of their adult contemporaries. It would seem in the past two months that Naperville has broadened its child life cycle adaptability. Not only is this a great town to raise the little hyper-capitalist portages, now it’s also a delightful place to bury and incarcerate them as well. My how we’ve grown!

To think that it is merely the refuse permeated drainage ditch of youth that pollutes the pristine lagoon waters of Naperville is to peer through the identical cataracts that the local news suffers from. The previously stated youth affliction, no matter how deprave, is merely a canker sore on a leprosy-ravaged body. There are countless volumes of preordained justifications that rape the child of self-accountability and the parent of responsibility. Such is not the case with the carnage that sodomized their most trusted staple citizens.

On a chilly March afternoon a house wife and mother sits in the kitchen of her attractive Victorian home methodically mixing several doses of heavy tranquilizers for various over the counter drugs. The precision gained from being employed by Edward’s hospital as a nurse aids her in the task. This Sunday school teacher administered the dosages to two of the three children. Each one she calmly laid in their bed to sleep. Then her soft, tender hands cut the flow of oxygen to their young, pink lungs. One hand pinched the small button nose restricting its function, the other, placed firmly over the delicate lips so that she felt the hot breath of life slip through her maternal fingers one last time. When the third child returns home from school, she sees in her motherly wisdom, that his life too, is not worth the energy it takes to live it. All three children lay lifeless and blue in each of their rooms as this giver and revoker of life attempts to drain her crimson fluid out of boorish holes in her arms. Then, a MOMENT OF CLARITY, her life is now worth living! This powerful deduction of destiny seemingly manifests itself while she lies half-conscious, caked in the half-dried pool of blood. Strength is mustered up to phone police and her life is saved thanks to the help of modern medicine. While residing in the hospital that she once deployed life saving measures, her former fellow co-workers have to draw straws to decide who would treat this new angel of death. Meanwhile, a city frantically searches for rationalization, or justification for this A.C. Wells’ like story. The best the towns’ people can muster is that a belated case of postpartum syndrome reared its horned head. The novelty sweeps through the town more rapidly than the terror of the actual deed. Soon most of the city alternates shifts of macabre milling in front of the police tape with flowers waiting for the CBS news team to appear.

The day prior to the mother/nurse/Sunday schoolteacher’s brain producing or not producing enough of a certain chemical causing a praying mantis like backlash, a guardian of truth and justice resolved he could no longer protect his body and soul against tyranny of his mind. The day this conclusion is deduced, he enters a forest preserve and with his police issue fire arm, the Naperville officer uses the lead projectiles to displace the contents of his skull onto the snow laden forest floor. He leaves behind no written confession of inner guilt, no evidence that is admissible, not even a warrant-worthy inkling of probable cause. He exits instead, a happy family, as the highest decorated officer on the elite Naperville police force and head of crime investigation unit. Opposed to the long and vapid out cry over the children’s slaughter, the public is given few details and fewer reasons. The local media left this conundrum of self desolation on the cutting room floor for half page photos of children staring at three white, haphazardly assembled ply wood crosses placed in front of the morbid, Victorian home. The rest of the montage consisted of inane quotations from the readily available, and publicity ravenous village idiots. A man, who felt his life of protecting and serving was not fulfilling, and his daily walk was not important enough to be missed, was swept under the carpet by these he protected.

This accursed city of fast food ideals and microwave morals demands ratiocination to be dictated quickly and in bite-sized morsels. They need to be able to expel all incomprehensible horror with a brisk swipe of psychology buzzword and a reaffirming and self-empowering quip from their Chicken Soup for the Soul library. They need to construct a protective layer between them and the atrocities at hand. This makes evil a debunkable term, individual and conceivable only under certain pretext, thus becoming easily avoidable. Much like trying to access the seas’ one creature at a time.

The thought that these incidents could be some sort of karmic recoil is so grossly self incriminating and cumbersome that it is quickly dismissed as to not disrupt the ‘ego’ barrier. There is a Chinese proverb that says, “He who defecates upon his doorstep is soon to step in it.” The retrospective glance quickly reveals that there are quite a few injustices waiting in the cosmic wings. Over the past forty years, farmers have been forced off their land by the spread of the festering plague of suburban excess and the rabid dollar nipping closely at its heels. After the astro-turf is laid, the feverish need for convenience sets in so the virus infects the last few farms as to establish strip malls were fresh food may be shipped in from other states. Prior to the dust bowel survivors there were the Native Americans. They are considered the single largest blasphemy in American, as well as suburban mentality. The abstract concept of working with the land is one that seems to go against the entire North American theology. Up until the semi-recent present, nature was our stepping stone, a wild and mindless prairie beast who need to be broken and bit placed in its mouth. Then, once the land has been spayed, what of these sun worshipping pagans? The feckless few that remained after prairie genocide are pushed into separate plots of unworkable tundra and demeaned to the point of rejecting their proud heritage and ingesting hair spray for its intoxicating properties. The cultural sympathizers in Naperville concur that naming the plush neighborhoods they congregate in after the defiled tribes is the best tribute they can bestow. Second best in fact, the always liberal people of Naperville reward them the utmost honor of having high school athletic teams named after a derogatory jeer.

The preeminent consternation of the latte-consuming public is that there is no grandiose elucidation, karmic or otherwise. The notion that pure evil exists in that farthest folds of our gray matter, and the ability to act upon its wickedness lurks in the eclipses of our souls, is most haunting of all. No matter how pious an individual, the spiritual-batter for evil lies in each of us. No matter how many garages, no matter how many zeros behind the paycheck, no matter how many degrees, when it comes to the recesses of evil, we are all on a level playing field, and that concept frightens the city of Naperville the most.