“On this corner, Tuesday, September 5, 2023, the police shot down the activist Marty Kline.” My father said into his old-fashioned CB handset. “What do you think about that?”
“IT’S A GODDAMNED OUTRAGE!” The eight people on the minibus all screamed together.
“It sure is.” He said. “They had the effrontery to say it was suicide, despite the fact that there were a hundred witnesses and he had two gunshot wounds to the head. Must’ve been quite a guy that Marty Kline, he shoots himself in the head, and then does it again just to be sure. No one questioned the ruling of suicide. You know what I think?”
“IT’S A GODDAMNED OUTRAGE!” The passengers shouted. I always hated this part of the tour. My dad didn’t want me home by myself after school, so I had to ride with him on his last tour of the day. I sat up front next to him, and I could read while it was just him talking, but when he got to the call-and-response I had a hard time tuning it out.
The tour ended where it began, in the French quarter. My father always ended the tour with his embarrassing pitch. “If you’ve enjoyed this tour of outrages against humanity, be sure to tell your friends, and remember, the book version of the tour is available for purchase at my pick address, 577humansuffering64.” The tourists left the minibus laughing and talking amongst themselves. My father came around to say goodbye to each of them personally. I noticed a lingerer, waiting until everyone was gone. I hated the lingerers, they were usually history buffs who wanted to point out flaws in my father’s patter, or suggest outrages my father’s tour had missed.
The lingerer was an older, thin black man, and he was of the second variety. They were standing right next to my window, so I heard their conversation whether I wanted to or not. “You missed the biggest outrage in New Orleans since slavery, and the worst part is it’s still going on.” The man said. “You drove right by it.”
“I did?” My father asked in his fake voice, “What is it?” He was just trying to humor a paying customer.
“The Purina plant.” The man said. “I used to work there so I know what goes into their cat food.”
“Lemme guess,” my father said, “horsemeat, right? That’s gross, truly, but I’d hardly call it an outrage against humanity.”
“No, not horses.” The man paused a moment. “Shut-ins.”
My father smiled as if the man had made a strange joke. “What do you mean shut-ins?” He asked.
“Did you know that Louisiana is the shut-in capital of the country? More shut-ins, per capita in this state than any other, by a lot.” He said. “And no one thinks twice about it when a shut-in goes missing. Everyone just assumes the poor bastard just killed himself.”
“Hmm,” my father said, “you used to work there?”
“That’s right.” He said.
“Did you round up the shut-ins? Kill them? Or were you in charge of grinding them into cat food?”
“Please don’t joke about it.” The man said. “I understand that it’s difficult to work up much sympathy for people who’ve closed themselves off from the rest of the world, but they are human beings.”
“Yes, you’re right, I’m sorry.” My father said. “I’ll look into it, Mr?”
“Ryan.”
“I’ll look into it Mr. Ryan. If what you say is true, I’ll definitely add it to the tour.” He shook the man’s hand.
Mr. Ryan could tell that my father was just shining him on, but he thanked him anyway and wandered off. My dad climbed back into the minibus and directed the drive program to take us home. He asked if I’d overheard the conversation. “That was a high quality, southern fried fruitcake right there. He knew I didn’t believe him, but he didn’t get mad, he just felt sorry for me. See your average New Jersey nutjob will get angry and curse you if you don’t believe that aliens are communicating through his third nipple or whatever, but down here they just smile at you as if you’re the delusional one.”
“Even the crazies are better down here?” I asked.
“You’re being sarcastic, but yes.” He said. Ever since the move, Newark vs. New Orleans had been a running theme of conversation. One of the reasons we’d moved was because the variety and severity of moral outrages in New Orleans would greatly improve his tour over the one he’d been doing back home. It was his way of trying to convince me that despite being uprooted and dumped into a sub-standard school, things were somehow better in a worse city.
Leaving aside the question of which state produced the highest quality nutjobs, what the man had said got me thinking. Was Louisiana really the shut-in capital of the world? If so, why? And what makes a person a shut-in? It wasn’t just an idle train of thought, I’d been searching for a suitable subject for a social studies paper, and I thought I’d found it.
-Describe an ongoing cultural phenomenon and explain what impact, positive or negative, it is having on the people of these United States of America.-
As the minibus made its way to our house I tried a few titles in my notebook:
Shut-Ins: How the fearful few are failing our forefathers
The True Cost of Hollywood’s Paranoia Factory; The story of shut-ins
Black Out the Windows- Solitary confinement vs. embattled freedom
Why do Shut-Ins Shut in, and what are they Shutting Out?
I decided I liked the idea, and I began doing research as soon as I got home. I started at a pick site called Statistical Analysis of Behavioral Disorders. Agoraphobia was the proper name for the fear of being outdoors, and I searched for it on the site. The results came up divided by age, gender, ethnic background, socioeconomic level, and by geographic location. To my surprise, Mr. Ryan was correct, Louisiana had the most agoraphobics of any state, and beyond that, we had the highest concentration of agoraphobia in the entire world. The obvious next step was to find out why, but not only could I not find a satisfactory answer to the question, I couldn’t even find anyone asking it.
In my initial inquiries into the subject I kept coming across references to something called the Indela Fund. It was a Louisiana based organization that did outreach to people with severe psychological disorders, including agoraphobia. I went to their pick site, thinking they might have some good information for my report, and I laughed when I saw the Purina logo at the bottom of the page. Apparently the Indela Fund was financed almost entirely by the Purina corporation. “Dad!” I shouted. “Come check this out!”
He was busy making dinner with Hal, this month’s boyfriend, but he came up to see what I was screaming about. “Penne Putanesca in ten minutes.” He said. I told him that Mr. Ryan was right about the number of shut-ins in Louisiana, and I told him about the Indela fund and its connection to Purina. “Maybe they are putting shut-ins in the cat food.” He said. “If I had a little more to go on I could ad it to the tour.”
“The tour? Come on dad, I was just surprised that the guy’s delusions were rooted in any sort of reality at all. You can’t actually think Purina is putting people in cat food.”
“No,” he said, “but the tour is about stories. I could always frame it as, ‘rumor has it,’ or ‘some have even suggested.’ I think people would like that.”
“It’s a goddamn outrage.” I said.
He punched me in the arm. “Come on, let’s eat.” He said.
As far as my dad’s boyfriends went, Hal was pretty ok. The guy could cook, and he was friendly to me. He seemed to like playing house with my dad, but he had enough sense not to turn me into a prop in the game. When the topic of agoraphobics came up at dinner, Hal mentioned that he had a cousin that was like that. “Do you think it would be possible for me to interview him?” I asked. “It would get me an A for sure.”
“Ooh, I don’t know.” Hal said. “Markie can be a little…”
“I’ll be polite and respectful.” I said. “I’m not going to ask him if he was molested as a kid or anything.”
“It’s not that.” Hal said. “It’s just depressing over there. We take turns checking up on him once a week, and I dread it when it??
?s my turn. It’s gross, he doesn’t do the dishes, the cats piss everywhere.”
“That’s okay.” I said.
“C’mon Hal, he can handle it.” My father said.
“Okay, this week is my brother’s turn to see Markie, I’ll call him and tell him I’ll do it instead. He’ll be happy. We usually do it on Sunday afternoon, okay?”
I had a bag of groceries on my lap when Hal and I pulled up in front of his cousin’s house. We were in his Korean 2-seater, it was around 1:15, Sunday. Cousin Markie lived in an old gothic-style mansion that had been divided into apartments. There was an annoyed-looking plump woman sitting on the front porch. “You need to tell that cousin of yours to clean up after his animals.” She said. “The whole hallway smells and his downstairs neighbors are complaining.”
“I’ll clean up Mrs. Martin.” Hal said.
“Once a week isn’t enough. Those cats aren’t litter trained you know.”
“I’ll talk to Markie.” Hal said.
We entered the building and went up two flights of stairs to the top floor. The end of the hall, where cousin Markie’s door was, smelled of mold and ammonia. Hal knocked and called out, then waited almost a whole minute, then knocked again and passed his small-screen over the lock. We entered a dim room. The only light came from behind a half-closed door to the right of where we stood. It was the flickering light of a big-screen that was playing in what I assumed was a bedroom. “Markie, why do you keep it so dark in here?” Hal called out as he began pulling open the shutters, flooding the cluttered mess with unwelcome sunlight. He took two steps to the small kitchen and snapped on the light. “You can put the groceries on the counter.” He said to me.
I went into the kitchen and put the bag down. A striped cat walked up to me and batted my shoelaces a few times and then walked away. “Markie,” Hal yelled, “come meet my friend, he wants to talk to you.”
“I thought Mason was coming today.” Markie said in a surprisingly deep voice. He’d ambled out of his bedroom and he stood leaned up against the doorframe that separated the kitchen from the living room. He was wearing shorts and had a tight beige t-shirt stretched over his big round belly. He was darker than Hal, with black curly hair that was neither long nor short, just unattended to.
“I traded days with him,” Hal said. “My friend wanted to meet you, he’s doing a report for school about people like you.” Hal opened up the fridge.
I began handing Hal the items that needed to be refrigerated, and he began making room for the stuff on the crowded shelves. “Marsella brought a tray of enchiladas last week.” Markie said.
“That was nice of her,” Hal said. “We brought groceries.”
“He wants to talk to me about Regenisis?”
“No, he wants to talk to you about how you don’t go out no more.” Hal said.
“Oh,” Markie made a face and finally looked at me. “I go out sometimes.” He said.
“When?” Hal asked.
“Mason took me to the dentist the other day.”
“That was over a year ago!” Hal said. “They had to sedate you. He said you scared some little girl in the waiting room, screaming at her and crying.”
“Don’t remind me.” Markie said, smiling at me and shaking his head.
“Why don’t you take my friend to your room to talk. He’s going to interview you okay? I’ll clean up this mess.”
“Okay okay okay.” Markie said.
“Leave the door open.”
“Okay okay okay.” Markie said again. I followed him into his hamster cage of a room. The big-screen was playing a telenovela about gangsters, and there were two cats lounging on the bed. I asked if I could turn on the light, and he said yes. He sat on the edge of the unmade bed, and I was about to sit in an easy chair in the corner but he stopped me. “Jinxy’s been peeing on there.” He said. “Use the chair.” He pointed to a folding chair on the other side of the bed. I walked across a field of dirty clothes to retrieve the chair. I set it up and got my small-screen transcribing our conversation and I began.
“How many cats do you have?”
“Four after Hex died.” He said. “I’d have more but the building manager hates innocent creatures. She’d drown all my cats if she could.”
“Do the cats fulfill your need for social interaction? Do they sort of… Keep you company?”
“Oh no, they’re totally indifferent to me most of the time.” He said. “You can’t interact socially with a cat, all you can do is feed them and pet them a little. I promise you these cats don’t care one bit about me, they’re just waiting until I die so they can eat me.”
I laughed, thinking he was kidding. He didn’t laugh with me. “You think they’d eat you?”
“I know they would.” He said. “Years ago I tried to start a cat sanctuary and I studied everything I could find about cats. They hardly ever kill their owners, but if their owners die, they’ll start eating them immediately. When a cat scratches you they infect you with hormones and pathogens…”
“Toxoplasmosis?” I asked.
“Yes, sometimes.” He said. “If an animal, a human for example, has been scratched and bitten by cats during their lifetime, their flesh becomes irresistible to all felines. Cats are hunters, and the meat gives them a special energy and emotional reward if it has been infected with feline hormones and pathogens. It’s nature’s way of rewarding them for being good hunters. Humans have been trying to turn them into scavengers for a millennium, leaving bowls of food for them to find. It’s not right.”
I considered asking him about the Indela Fund and Purina, but I decided to save it. “What happens when you go out?” I asked instead.
“I’m not sure, it just seems like everything is evil or something. Like trees and the sidewalks, the houses and especially the cars, they all seem so aggressive, like they want to smother me for fun. What you have to understand is that I was bred for empathy, I’m a genetic dead-end basically. I’m fourth generation Regenisis. Have you heard of the Regenisis Project?”
“No,” I said, “What is it?”
“Genetic engineering, the old-fashioned kind. After world war two the U.S. brought over a bunch of Nazi scientists to continue their work. It’s well-documented in the field of rockets and the space program, but the U.S. poached scientists from all fields. One thing the Nazi’s were particularly interested in was genetics and they brought over a doctor named Heinrich Spoer. He was interested in breeding humans for certain traits, like humans have been doing to dogs for centuries. To accomplish this he started the Regenisis corporation in 1947. It was a secret government program made to look like a private company. It posed as a fertility clinic and operated as one -I think it was the first fertility clinic in the country.”
“What were the traits they were breeding humans for?”
“Oh, strength, longevity, different types of intelligence, sexually pleasing characteristics, or in my case, empathy. See when a couple went to Regenisis they were put through exhaustive mental and physical testing. If they were found to be exceptional in one regard or another they would be brought into one of the programs and their genetic material would be comingled with someone else who was exceptional in the same way. Of course all that was hidden from the participants. They thought the company was just helping them conceive. There’s some evidence that when a Regenisis office opened up in a particular city, the birth rate there would go way down, suggesting they might’ve been deploying some kind of mass birth control to ensure that they had a lot of potential parents to choose from.”
“I’ve never heard of this company.” I said.
“No, they scrubbed themselves from the public record in the seventies and eighties, just before the rise of the pre-pick computer network. Basically they went underground. They had to find any reference to Regenisis and destroy it. That was the last moment in history that you could do something like that. Then all they had to do was wait for people to forget. It was such a well-known company that the job coul
dn’t have been easy. It was a household name all through the fifties and sixties. But I guess anything is possible if you have unlimited time and money.”
“How did you find out about it?” I asked him.
“My father found out that he was a product of Regenisis from his great grandmother’s diary. He found some information about the company on the old network before the great corruption took it out. He was trying to make a documentary about it, but he died under what I consider to be mysterious circumstances before it was complete. He interviewed someone who used to work for the company, and this person administered one of the tests and determined that my father was in the empathy line. Before my father died he told me that if I were to procreate, my offspring would also most certainly be part of the empathy line. See if I got married, or was in a sexual relationship with a woman, she would become ill and need some kind of surgery. At that time the Regenisis corporation would implant her with a zygote fertilized with my sperm and the eggs of a woman who was also fourth generation in the empathy line.”
“How in the world would they get your sperm?” I asked.
Hal was walking past the door to the room at that moment and he stopped and stuck his head in. “You guys talking about sperm? Is everything okay?” He looked at me.
“It’s fine.” I said.
He shrugged and continued down the hall. “They have ways of getting sperm and eggs and anything else they need. It’s a massive program, but my father shouldn’t have worried. The empathy line actually terminates with the fourth generation. The man my father interviewed described the empathy line as an attempt to create an army of Jesuses, whose unconditional love for all humanity would teach and inspire the masses. Instead they got an army of people too sensitive to leave the house. The empathy program is centered in Lake Charles, so there’s a ton of us fourth gens around here.”
“Louisiana has the highest rate of agoraphobia of any state.” I said.
“One of your cats is dead.” Hal called out from the kitchen.
“What?” Markie jumped up and ran to the kitchen. The cat was curled up in a corner, under the bottom edge of the cupboard doors. “Oh no!” He said. “Jinxy, what happened?”
“I thought he was sleeping,” Hal said, “but when I opened the cupboard he didn’t move so I checked him.”
Markie sat on the kitchen floor. He started to lift the cat, but it was stiff and came up in one piece so Markie put it back down and started to cry. Hal kneeled next to him and put his hand on his cousin’s back. “I’m sorry Markie, he was a good cat.”
“Jinxy was a girl!” Markie said.
Hal shot me a weary look. “Come on Markie, come sit in the front room, we’ll take care of the cat.” Markie reluctantly got up and went into the front room. Hal took a plastic trash bag and wrapped the cat corpse in it, and handed me another and told me to hold it open. He shoved Jinxy in and took the bag from me. He twisted it shut and tied a knot close to the body and then set it down on the floor near the front door. He came back into the kitchen and got the hot water running and we both washed our hands.
I watched him make cousin Markie a sandwich and pour him a glass of soda. He brought it out to the front room. “I’m sorry about your cat Markie, but don’t worry, we’ll take care of the body.”
“Thanks.” He said. “I’m glad you were here. I don’t know what I would’ve done otherwise.” We watched him take a few bites, and then Hal said it was about time we left. “We were in the middle of an interview,” he said, “was there anything else you wanted to know?”
“Um, I think I have enough for my report,” I said, “but I was wondering if you’ve ever heard of the Indela Fund?”
“Oh yeah, they sent someone over to talk to me.” He said.
“They did?” Hal asked. “What did they want?”
“They said they wanted to offer me free counseling.” Markie said. “But they really just wanted to grind me up into cat food. I told them to go to hell.”
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Inoculation Story