This Is Only a Test (9 page)

According to psychologist Nandor Fodor, claustrophobia—a fear from which Bobby Watson apparently did not suffer until his
fatal moments—is defined as the “widespread morbid dread of confined spaces, small rooms, caves, tunnels, elevators, or pressing crowds.” Dr. Robert Campbell later revised the definition to include additional claustrophobia-inducing locales (“theaters, classrooms, boats, or narrow streets”).

Neither definition makes mention of refrigerators.

If you were to ask a sufferer of claustrophobia to name additional omissions, he might mention cellars, airplanes, cars, churches, roller coasters, or the daily fear of wearing a necktie.

Imagine being buried alive in a hole. It's like that
.

While the majority of mid-twentieth-century psychologists could easily diagnose the phobia, they struggled to gauge the degree to which a patient suffered. As a result, in 1979 psychologists developed the claustrophobia scale, a twenty-question assessment that deduced the acuteness of one's fear. Participants were asked to rate their anxiety or avoidance on a number of uncomfortable scenarios, including “entering a windowless lavatory and locking the door,” “riding a small elevator by yourself,” and “being outdoors in a fog when you can only see a few yards in front of you.”

Once more, refrigerators were left off the scale.

When tracing claustrophobia's roots, Nandor Fodor looked first to one's true beginning: birth. In his 1949 book,
The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning
, Fodor provides an in-depth description of the brief yet horrifying moment all newborns share; the moment in which the child must take his or her first breath independent of the mother. “If this interval is too prolonged, the baby will turn blue and suffocate,” Fodor explains. “If the baby lives to breathe, it has tasted death by suffocation.”

While few claim to remember this post-birth near-death experience, Fodor argues that the psychological stress of the moment is forever encoded in the subconscious, that “evidence of it can be found in morbid suffocation fears.” For Fodor, our fear of confined spaces (and the possibility of suffocating within them) is simply an unavoidable side effect of being born, one that points toward an inarguable truth: before we can breathe, we can't.

While an estimated 5–7 percent of the world suffers from claustrophobia, far fewer suffer from its little-known counterpart, claustrophilia—which Dr. Robert Campbell defines as the “pathological desire to be confined and enclosed within a small space.” Confirming Fodor's work, Campbell adds that claustrophilia is often “interpreted psychoanalytically as an escape from the world and a tendency to return to the womb.”

He could only hold his breath for so long
.

If claustrophobia serves as a psychological reminder that our mothers' wombs are one-way swinging doors, sufferers of claustrophilia might well argue the opposite. While claustrophobia can be acquired at birth or developed later in life, claustrophilia seems to be a biological imperative of birth. It's as if, in the early stages of development, Fodor's theory of birth trauma as a gateway to claustrophobia remains momentarily repressed, at least for newborns, who remain the world's most exuberant practitioners of the claustrophilic life. An industry of baby care books seems to confirm this, including Dr. Harvey Karp's parental favorite,
The Happiest Baby on the Block
, which also argues that babies much prefer the tight wrap of a swaddle to the freedom of unrestrained sleep.

Karp's theory proved particularly true for my then-four-month-old son, whom we tucked tight in a swaddle and inserted into an MRI machine on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. He wasn't ill, but had simply been selected for a psychological study. Since a trusted friend promised to administer the test, my wife and I signed off on the experiment.

Despite our efforts, we couldn't swaddle him tight enough to alleviate his fear, nor could I blame him for having it. After all, if my own helpless body had been folded and inserted into a cylindrical tube, I, too, would have cried. But eventually the swaddle did its work, his mother and I keeping careful watch as his wails subsided and he returned to a womblike state. We witnessed no trauma, just contentment, though as he slept, I began feeling claustrophobic on his behalf. I took a seat in a nearby rocking chair and watched as the red glowing numbers kept track of his heartbeat like a basketball score in flux. I rocked to that heartbeat, the quick back and forth of the chair a small comfort as I prayed for him to stay asleep.

Bobby was awake for all of it, conscious and clawing as the water wiggled through the seams like eels
.

As I rocked there, I couldn't help but wonder about the long-lasting ramifications of this trial, if we might forever scar him if he woke while trapped inside the tube.

He did wake eventually, breathless as he struggled to break free from the straitjacket in which we'd enclosed him. Our psychologist friend immediately shut the experiment down, pressing the red button that eased the magnets back into place, killing the buzzing and whirring that had engulfed us all moments prior. The damage was done, though we hoped nothing was permanent. Not
as it had been for the fictional Bobby Watson—or far worse—for the real-life Larry and his cousin Paul, for Cynthia and her brothers Joseph and Martin, all of whom drowned above water.

We left the lab and did not return there.

We don't swaddle him anymore; he doesn't let us.

If we were to be subjected to a bombing attack, what type bombs would probably be used against us?

“Questionnaire Used at Meeting of Residents Residing in
Zone 2, District 1, Section #2, Ft. Wayne” (1942)

We searched for a lake monster on the shores of Lake Superior. This was in July of 2012. My wife, Meredith, son Henry, and I had headed north from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the hope that the vacation town of Duluth, Minnesota, might momentarily insulate us from the horrors of the world.

It didn't.

Didn't drown out the drone missiles dropped in Pakistan or silence the Syrian uprising.

In the days prior to our trip, I'd found I could hardly turn on the television without learning of the latest in a long line of disasters—flash floods in Russia, drought in West Africa, a car bombing in Kandahar. Not to mention an earthquake in New Zealand and Ireland's torrential rains. For days on end, cable news had
little trouble confirming that every last vestige of the planet was crumbling or washing away, bombed or broken or both.

Except, of course, Duluth.

By the time we arrived at Minnesota Point beach, we were disheartened to find that we'd already lost most of the daylight. Still, I kept my six-month-old son confined to the safety of the shore by using what little light remained to search for monsters.

“Keep your eyes peeled for an arched neck,” I said as we sat in the sea grass, “or a couple of dark humps in the water.”

Henry knew little of lake monsters, though his cryptid-loving father knew plenty.

I filled him in the best I could, but Henry's interest had little to do with the lake or the creatures that may or may not inhabit it. Instead, he focused on the sand, deemed it edible, and proceeded to sprinkle it into his mouth.

Sighing, I put our monster hunt on hold to deal with more pressing matters.

“We'll try again tomorrow,” I said, scraping the sand from his tongue.

Surely the monsters would wait for us.

Was it Dr. Spock who said parents should scare the living daylights out of their kids in order to expose them to fear? Perhaps I misunderstood. Nevertheless, I manufactured our lake monster hunt for the same reason my family has instilled fear into offspring for generations—because much in the way a flu shot works, we believe a small dose of fear in a controlled environment is far safer than the alternative.

Though I fancy myself a fiction writer, my mother's fictions were always best, especially her creation of Mr. Green—a much-feared, nonexistent neighbor who terrified both my brother and me throughout our childhoods. We never so much as glimpsed the guy, knew startlingly little about him, yet the mysterious Mr. Green became the manifestation of everything that scared us. Our imaginations concocted a creature so vile, so cruel, that we never dared cross my mother for fear she'd make good on her bluff to introduce us to the man.

Except for the time my brother did cross her.

Who can remember his transgression? All I know is that the punishment could hardly have fit the crime. I watched helplessly from the windows of our Fort Wayne, Indiana, home as she buckled him into the backseat of the Ford Taurus and drove toward Mr. Green's supposed house.

My brother later recounted all of it. How our mother pulled into Mr. Green's alleged driveway, turned off the engine, and waited.

And how as he sweated bullets in the backseat, my brother prayed to the God of little boys that Mr. Green might take pity on a wretch like him.

I'll never be bad again, I'll never be bad again, I'll never be bad again
 . . .

Miraculously, God answered.

My straight-faced mother had put on quite a performance, but just as my brother's anxiety reached its apex, she shrugged and reversed the car out of the drive.

“Looks like he's not home,” my mother said, shaking a finger at my brother in the rearview. “You got lucky this time, mister.”

As my son and I sat in the sea grass on that Sunday night in Duluth, I realized just how much I needed him to believe in our lake monster. I needed it the same way my mother needed us to believe in Mr. Green. I felt that if I could expose Henry to a tiny dose of a lesser fear, then I could shoulder the heavier burdens myself. And not just your everyday, run-of-the-mill global upheaval, but the more pressing matters, the threats that hit closer to home. Such as the burden of knowing that any number of once seemingly innocuous household objects—from bookshelves to coffee tables—take on a far more menacing role when a child's in the room. And the burden of recognizing that even if I did manage to beat the needle-in-a-haystack odds at successfully childproofing our child's life, it was impossible to childproof his future. There were simply not enough latches or plug covers or antibacterial soaps. Not enough bubble wrap, or water wings, or luck.

Despite teeth brushing, and hand washing, and practicing stop, drop, and roll, I would never be able to predict when the drunk driver might barrel into our lives. Nor would I know which dog would bark and which would bite and which of the two had rabies. Would never know which square of sidewalk would bloody the knee, or who would break whose heart in the schoolyard. I am not alone in my worry. All any parent can predict is that none of our children will ever be immune to everything, and that at some point, our years of nonstop parental anxieties might come to fruition just as we'd feared.

And so, for that brief moment in Duluth, I dreamed up a fear for him that I could still control. I assured myself that fabrication would serve Henry well down the road. That a lake monster would shield him from drone attacks and flash floods and car bombings
in Kandahar. But more importantly, it might also make him think twice before leaping into the bacteria-filled lake, or choking down any more sandcastles. I was just being a pragmatist. Just a pragmatic, monster-hunting father.

My mother likely confirmed the value of her own parental indiscretions with similar rationalizations. Sure, a bit of minor therapy might be in order as a result of our Mr. Green–induced traumas, but wasn't it a necessary means to the end? Was it not better for her to frontload our fears rather than expose us to a larger dose of a harsher reality? After all, thanks to my Mr. Green anxiety, for several years I was able to naively believe that the two Gulf wars were fought exclusively with nine irons and putters. Ultimately, I was no worse off for my mostly bubble-wrapped childhood. I lifted the lighter load, while Mom bore the weight of the world.

That night on the beach, we saw no evil, we heard no evil, there was none; though months later, there was plenty of it all over the world. Televisions piped horrors into households from Duluth on down. Thankfully, Henry was still too young to know the difference between Sandy Hook and Hurricane Sandy and the sand he devoured in Duluth.

There will be plenty of time for differentiating later, I thought.

For now, when the news reports on the latest tragedy, Meredith and I carry our twenty-eight-pound boy to his bed and return him once more to the safety of his room.

On one particularly depressing news day, we take to his Legos and construct our Lake Superior monster, complete with arched neck and dark humps.

Henry laughs at our creation, and we laugh, too.

“We've found him!” I say. “We've found that scary scalawag at last!”

But the very next moment he's destroying that monster faster than a flash flood.

As we watch him, our stomachs drop as our own worst fear pulls into sharp focus: no matter how hard we try—or how much we love him—the fear we fake for him today might well turn true tomorrow.

For Michael Martone

In the 1940s, citizens would tell you that Fort Wayne, Indiana, was so wrapped in magnetic wire, superchargers, sonar systems, bombshells, pistons, amplidynes, and dynamotors that for a brief moment the people there became important enough to fear obliteration. Employees at General Electric, Rea Magnet Wire Company, and International Harvester clocked in seven days a week to support the war effort, churning out all the necessary parts.

Without Fort Wayne, perhaps there would be no B-24 bomber.

Without Fort Wayne, perhaps there would be no atomic bomb.

When Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima, a small piece of Fort Wayne was lodged inside. On Taylor Street, Joslyn Steel Manufacturing shaped uranium into ingots, contributing to the killing of 160,000 people 6,700 miles away.