The Ballad Of Elliot's Deflated Erection

In the story “Helping,” Elliot is, to quote a title by H.G. Wells, a mind at the end of its tether. The aching of sobriety and the soul-crushing weight of bourgeois mediocrity combine to drive a splinter into his soul. He is fed up by his self-righteous, sow of a wife; by the banality of his weakling patients with their drive-by-night stories; and by the smirk of his happy neighbour cross-country skiing across the arid desert of his soul. He wants to take a shotgun and blow a hole in his whole system of perception, and so he does, but only scares some ducks. Drinking makes him dynamic, alive with danger and the thrill of an urban Vietnam. Without it his life is work, couch, television, death. Whiskey is a seductive brown god, a Vishnu for the modern polytheism of Western decadence. His wife is named Grace but she offers none. She is a dilapidated husk of femininity, sucking away his virile man-soul like the leeching proto-sentience of a Venus flytrap. Why focus on defeating his interior demons when the demons of the exterior world do a Saint Vitus dance over the cracking tectonic miasma of his soul? A small gesture of connection, he seems to be asking his wife; that would be enough to save me from today. But what of tomorrow, of the asphalt horizon spewing twitching embryo-toxins like a Vesuvius after the decline and fall. The gun fires blanks like cancer-ridden sperm, the neighbour continues to ride a paradise dream as false as Nordic Thule. After this deluge, what rainbow can there be?