Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (12 page)

“It can prepare us to face the present,” Dr. Wilburforce said. “We’re not talking about heaven or hell, purgatory or past lives in this Congregation.” He twiddled his thumbs in a satisfied fashion. “That’s part of what I mean about no mumbo-jumbo. One life is one more than most people can deal with. There’s a Zen
koan
with a memorable payoff. You may already know it,” he added charitably. “The supplicant asks his master what he should do to improve his life. ‘Have you had your dinner?’ the master asks. ‘Yes,’ says the supplicant. Then wash the dishes,’ his master says.” Dr. Wilburforce arched his eyebrows meaningfully. “‘Wash the dishes.’ So simple. And yet many people can’t even do that. But until you’ve finished washing the dishes, cleaning up the clutter you’ve left, you haven’t dealt with your immediate past. And until you’ve dealt with your immediate past, you’re no match for your more remote past, your Embedded Past, as we call it.”

“Your past is your enemy,” I said.

He unlaced his fingers in order to flop a dismissive hand around. “Dogma,” he said. “Useful dogma, but dogma nonetheless. We’ve gone beyond that here.”

“Beyond it to what?” Eleanor said.

“Oh, dear,” Dr. Wilburforce said a trifle uncomfortably. “That’s a very complicated question.” His eyes wandered over the room and paused for a moment, fixed on a point over my head, and I suddenly knew that someone was standing in the corridor behind us, looking in through the partially closed door. I stifled a paranoid urge to turn around. Dr. Wilburforce picked up a large briar pipe and polished its bowl on the side of his nose.

“Very complicated indeed,” he continued, backing off from his answer, “and I’m not sure it can be compressed to good effect in a short newspaper story. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Without getting into the fine points of doctrine,” Eleanor said, leaning forward, “can you explain the difference between the Congregation and the Church of the Eternal Moment? And, no, we don’t.”

Dr. Wilburforce lit up and blew plumes of bluish smoke through his nostrils. The pipe made a wet bubbling sound as he sucked at it, and his eyes once again flicked toward the door behind me “I could, of course,” he said. “I could. Good heavens, of course I could. Who if not me, eh?” He gave a tense little chuckle, exhaling fumes that smelled of burning cherries. “Well, well. I hope you won’t mind if I ask you: what is the general slant of your story?”

“We’ve heard rumors,” Eleanor said, repeating word for word the line I’d given her, “of improprieties in the Church of the Eternal Moment.”

“Improprieties.” Wreathed in his fruity smoke, Dr. Wilburforce tasted the word like a sommelier trapped between a substandard wine and a smart customer. “Spiritual improprieties?” he said cautiously.

“Financial,” Eleanor said.

Relaxation seeped through Dr. Wilburforce’s outsize frame. His fingers groped toward each other and met again over his stomach like five overweight pairs of illicit lovers on safe ground at last. He actually sighed. “I’m not surprised,” he said gravely around his pipe. “Not at all.”

“But there
is
a relationship, isn’t there, between your church and theirs?” Eleanor said.

“We make no secret of the fact. Man is descended, or rather ascended, as science tells us, from the apes. But science doesn’t suggest that men are apes. We of the Congregation are ascended from the Church of the Eternal Moment in the same sense that Protestantism is ascended from the Romish church. Although,” he added hastily, “I mean no disrespect to the Church of Rome, should either of you belong to it.”

Eleanor, a Taoist to her toenails, surmounted the slur with a brave smile that put Wilburforce in her debt. “No offense,” she said, “although I can’t speak for Algy.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I used to be a choir boy, but it finally cleared up.”

“The Whore of Babylon,” Dr. Wilburforce said loudly. Eleanor sat up, looking startled. “What is more important, I ask you, souls or profit? Yes, we share some points of doctrine with the Church of the Eternal Moment. Yes, we believe in the early Revealings and in the value of Listening. Yes, we believe that man’s potential is infinite if he can clear away the clutter of his past. Or hers, of course,” he amended mechanically for Eleanor’s benefit. “We, too, concentrate our efforts on solving the problems of this world, this life, rather than wandering aimlessly around in the vast slough of time and space that we call the Cosmos.” He pronounced the word with a pedantic pleasure, as though other people insisted on calling it something else. Satisfied with the sound of it, he drew vehemently on his pipe and coughed, his face turning a pulse-pounding shade of purple. “But do we speculate in real estate?” he said, blinking back tears. “We do not. Do we invest the donations of our faithful in pork-belly futures and other commodities and money-market funds? We do not. Do we go on television and mewl and puke of poverty for hours on end in order to bleed little old ladies of their food stamps? We most certainly do not. Do we put our tax-exempt dollars into an automobile dealership in Downey or a miniature-golf course in Reseda? Most emphatically we do not.”

“A miniature-golf course?” I said. “Reseda?”

“Excuse me for asking, Dr. Wilburforce,” Eleanor said pleasantly, “but how much of this is sour grapes?”

“My dear Miss Chan, what an extraordinary question. Ha, ha, ha,” Wilburforce laughed, pronouncing each syllable separately and precisely, as though he were trying out a phrase in a language he didn’t speak. “Sour grapes indeed. No, Hubert Wilburforce is not perfect. He too can succumb to temptation. Until he was cleansed by the process of Listening he grasped as greedily at the plums of the world as the next man. Like everyone else, he wanted a bigger piece of the pie.” Eleanor winced. “Perhaps he’s been fortunate that the temptations he’s encountered recently have been relatively small ones, unlike those that are now, even now, distorting and perverting the Church of the Eternal Moment.” He bit down hard enough on the stem of his pipe to crack it. Pulling it out quickly, he looked at it in dismay. Outside, the rain began to pour down in a serious fashion.

Eleanor glanced at me for a cue. “Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “When and why did you break off from the Church?”

“When? Ten years ago.” He drew experimentally at the pipe and looked over my head again. “And why?” I turned and saw Sister Zachary failing to duck out of sight in time. “Because the Church changed.”

“Can you be a little more specific?” Eleanor said, writing something on her pad.

“It became a business,” Wilburforce said distastefully. “When Alon stopped speaking through Anna, the Church was at a crossroad, so to speak. It was actually a moment of opportunity, had it been grasped. The leadership could have devoted itself to the study of the Revealings. It could have refined the Listening process, as we have, and worked to help its members to achieve their potential. That was all that Alon had ever wanted. Instead, the old leadership frittered and sputtered until a new leadership arose, spreading hysteria through the Church, demanding that a new Speaker stand forth. Suggestible little girls were examined for the ability to Speak, as though it were something physical, like acne.”

“Or a cleft palate,” I said.

“Anna did
not
have a cleft palate.” Wilburforce puffed angrily on his damaged pipe. “She had a mild speech impediment, but there was no trouble distinguishing between her T’s and her L’s. What happened was that the second little girl got the name wrong and they had to stick with it. It became Aton. And it became nonsense.”

“So the second Speaker was a fake?” Eleanor asked. “And the new one too?”

“Um,” Dr. Wilburforce said, focusing over my head to meet the eyes of Sister Zachary, who’d evidently returned to the doorway. “I don’t want this to degenerate into name-calling and finger-pointing. I’m sure the little girls are perfectly sincere. Many of the charismatic religions depend on spontaneous utterances to shape their doctrines. In the Salem witch trials, if you remember your history, there was no shortage of witnesses to condemn those poor harmless old ladies. Most of the witnesses were young girls. I’m sure they believed their testimony when they gave it. Young girls are particularly susceptible to that kind of hysterical reaction.” He gave a hollow, slightly uneasy chuckle. “Remember the Beatles,” he said.

“So the Church created Speakers?” Eleanor was writing busily in her pad as she asked the question.

“Intentionally, you mean?” Dr Wilburforce said, his discomfort increasing visibly. “No, no, no, no, you mustn’t quote me as having said anything like that. The leadership of the Church probably believed that a new Speaker would arise. And they obviously believed they needed one. All I’m suggesting is that their, um, their very eagerness created a climate in which it was probably inevitable that one or more of the young faithful would begin to spout Revealings. Poor dear, it wasn’t her fault that she got Alon’s name wrong.”

“Let me boil this down,” Eleanor said. “You’re saying that the leaders of the Church of the Eternal Moment created a climate, presumably twice, that would make little girls start to Speak, and that they then exploited those little girls to pull more revenue from the congregation, which they invested for sheer profit.”

The door creaked open behind me and I turned to see Sister Zachary waddle into the room. “Don’t put words in Dr. Wilburforce’s mouth,” she said sharply. “He said nothing of the kind.” Dr. Wilburforce hastily retreated from the conversation and sucked at his pipe, focusing all his attention on its bowl. “You’re the one who came in here talking about financial improprieties,” Sister Zachary continued implacably. “Dr. Wilburforce has never alleged that the Church is involved in anything illegal. He’s simply suggested that they are more interested in matters of funding than we are.”

“There are libel laws,” Dr. Wilburforce said weakly. “The Church is litigious in the extreme. As we’ve learned.”

“Pipe down, you,” Sister Zachary said. “I told you not to give this interview.”

“Wait,” I said. “Miss Chan and I are doing a piece on the Church of the Eternal Moment, not on your Congregation. We’re not trying to cause trouble for you. Dr. Wilburforce can be completely candid with us without worrying about the consequences. If he wishes, if you wish, we’ll treat this interview as deep background. We won’t name him anywhere in the story.”

“Tell me another one,” Sister Zachary said knowingly. “We know what the press is like.”

Eleanor opened her eyes so wide that Zsa Zsa Gabor’s sunglasses wouldn’t have covered them and ruffled the pages in her notebook. “I’ll rip these out if you like,” she said. “You can have them. We’re not going to quote you. We just want to tell the truth about the Church.” She actually tore one page out. It was blank.

Sister Zachary and Dr. Wilburforce exchanged a look. “How do we know that’s true?” he asked.

“Remember Deep Throat?” I improvised. Dr Wilburforce coughed, and Sister Zachary’s eyes began to roll. “I don’t mean the porno movie,” I added hastily. “I mean Woodward and Bernstein’s source for
All the President’s Men
. Everyone wanted to know who he was, but the two reporters never told anyone. Even now, now that it’s all over, they haven’t. We may not be Woodward and Bernstein, but if this story is as good as we think it is, we’ll protect anyone who helps us.”

There was a long silence. Wilburforce and Sister Zachary exchanged a glance. Sister Zachary shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

We all sat there, if you didn’t count Sister Zachary, who was standing.

“May I say something?” Eleanor asked in her sweetest and most submissive-Asian-female voice.

The tone seemed to lift Wilburforce’s spirits. “Of course you may, my dear.”

“I don’t mean to sound pushy or anything,” Eleanor said, smiling winningly, “but I’ve already got all these notes. Also, Algy’s wired, which means that this whole interview is on tape. I mean, there’s just no way you can deny what you’ve already said, and we’ve made no promises about keeping you out of the story so far.” She looked from Wilburforce to Sister Zachary. “This is difficult for someone who’s not used to confrontation,” she said, “but you could probably get your asses sued to hell and gone if we just print what we have already.” She shrugged apologetically, and I stifled the urge to kiss her. “If you see what I mean,” she said.

“I told you,” Sister Zachary said. “I told you you were asking for trouble.” She subsided, tapping her foot angrily.

Wilburforce pumped several pounds of innocence into his dark eyes. “I’m a great admirer of the Church, actually,” he said. “As you pointed out, we derived much of our doctrine from theirs, although we’ve, um, refined and purified it. It’s absurd even to consider the possibility that anything I’ve said could be actionable.” Distracted by the sheer ludicrousness of the possibility, he picked absently at his nose. “Still,” he added, “you’re the experts.”

Sister Zachary snorted again, but other than that she held her peace.

Wilburforce dreamily examined his finger. “And since, as you say, your story is really about the Church rather than the Congregation, I suppose I should ask you how we can proceed. I think it was Jefferson who said he would prefer a free press with no government to a government with no press. A sentiment, I may say, that I certainly share.”

“In other words,” I said, “we can ask you some more questions?”

“More questions,” Dr. Wilburforce said dully. He looked despairingly at Sister Zachary.

“In exchange, there will be no mention of any of this,” Sister Zachary said after a couple of warm-up breaths. “Not me, not him, not the Congregation.”

“Agreed,” Eleanor said.

Dr. Wilburforce glanced at his weighty wristwatch. “We have your oath,” he said. “The next gathering is due in a little more than an hour, and we have to prepare. You’ve got ten minutes.” He lifted himself ponderously back onto the corner of his desk.

“What was your job in the Church?” I said. Sister Zachary pulled up a rickety-looking chair. I held my breath as she sat in it.