Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (6 page)

Listener Dooley was sitting straight up now, or as straight as his paunch would let him, taking it all in.

“Skippy,” I said, “you’re going a little fast for me. Is there someplace we can talk?”

Listener Dooley looked vaguely affronted and then remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be Listening.

Skippy cast a guileless glance around the room. “There’s nobody here,” he said.

“Think again. How about the parking lot?”

He gazed through the windows. “It’s dark out there.”

“Darkness is an illusion. If you could see through it, it’d be light.”

“Simeon,” he said, his face falling, “you mean the only reason you’re here is to see me?”

“Well, I didn’t fly four hundred miles to be told it’s dark outside.”

“Aw, hell,” he said. “I thought …”

“Maybe later. I’ve been invited to the Revealing.”

He lit up again. “You’re going to go, aren’t you?”

I took his arm. “We’ll see,” I said, steering him through the door. “Let’s talk first.”

In the parking lot, Skippy shivered as if he somehow lacked the fat man’s natural insulation. “You really should come to the Revealing,” he said a trifle sulkily. “It’d be good for you.”

“Skippy, the plane home doesn’t leave until ten. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll sit through a Maria Montez movie.”

“You’ll love it. Honestly, you’ve never seen anything like it. This little girl, except it’s not her really, of course, but whoever it is, it’s something.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“So you’ll stay?”

“First things first. Do you know anyone who calls himself Ambrose Harker?”

“I think I might have known a Harker a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone named Ambrose.”

“Who was the Harker, then?”

“Her name was Alice. Jesus, this is when I was in high school. A little pale girl with terrible skin. A physics brain, remember physics brains? I sat behind her in math so I could cheat off her tests.”

“What about her brothers?” I knew I was getting nowhere, but the only way you learn the answer to a question is by asking it.

“Alice Harker? If she’d had brothers they wouldn’t have admitted it.”

“So who
have
you talked to me about?”

He rubbed his chin and then transferred his attention lower down, tugging at his loose shirt where the fat bulged through. “Nobody,” he said at last. “Why?”

“Nobody came to you and asked for a recommendation?”

“Simeon,” he said, “I haven’t told anybody about what you did for me.” He finished with his shirt. “How could I, you know?”

“Sensitive.”

“Dynamite. Especially for a fat middle-aged actor who’s earning a decent paycheck for the first time since he stopped selling real estate.”

“So not a soul?”

He opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Nobody at all.”

“Okay. Do you know a guy in his late thirties, bony and unpleasant, with a flat-top? Got a tailor who should be a vivisectionist, makes a lot of spit noises when he talks?”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Big Adam’s apple? Blue eyes?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Insists on perfect understanding all the time?”

Something flickered in Skippy’s eyes. “Like how?” he said.

“Like asking ‘Do you understand?’ after every declarative sentence. Like grilling waiters on whether they’ve got his order straight.”

“No,” Skippy said shortly. He looked nervous. “Why?”

“Somebody’s jerking me around. Somebody who said you sent him.”

“Simeon, I didn’t send anybody.”

“Somebody who maybe set somebody up to get killed.”

Skippy’s eyes widened. Then a peal of bells rang out, a secular angelus floating through the mists of Big Sur.

“That’s it,” he said. “Come with me?”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Zip,” he said, “nothing. I’m sorry. Come on, I want a decent seat.”

“For what?”

“The Revealing.”

Chapter 6

“I
t’s the best thing that’s happened to me since my second divorce,” Skippy said earnestly as he steered us between buildings toward a large lighted structure. He was making an obvious effort to keep his fervor in check, but his hammy hand clutched my arm as if he were afraid I’d try to make a break for it.

The paths were full of people, young, old, and in between, mostly white, mostly prosperous-looking, clearly eager to answer the summons of the bell. Ever the gentleman, Skippy stopped to allow an old lady in a walker to make a wobbly right from a tributary path onto the main drag. Listener Simpson was helping her, to the old lady’s obvious irritation, and she flashed us a harried smile. Once they’d set off in front of us, Skippy hit his pedestrian’s overdrive and dragged me past them.

“So why is it so great? Are your arteries any better? Is your blood pressure down?”

“No and yes, in order. Even with all this blubber, my blood pressure is lower than it’s ever been. And without medication, too,” he added triumphantly.

This was a revelation. Back when I’d known him, Skippy’s medicine cabinet had been bigger than my living room. “Your druggist must be furious,” I said.

We were slowing now as the faithful converged into a couple of well-behaved lines in order to pass through the single open door. The light flooding through the door was brilliant. We’d walked a quarter of a mile, and despite the coolness of the night, Skippy’s face was filmed with an enthusiast’s sweat.

“Calm down,” I said. “Bliss can kill. Orgasms claim many lives each year.”

“That’s another thing,” he said, heedless of all the ears around us. “I feel much less compelled to womanize.” One of Skippy’s problems was that he didn’t have a subconscious. Like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, he said everything, and usually to the wrong person.

We were toddling slowly along in the line now. Skippy’s eyes shone and he licked his lips hungrily. I felt as if I were boarding an airplane for Akron or Duluth, someplace I’d never been and didn’t want to go.

“It’s changed my life,” he said. “The Church has changed my life. And at my age, too.”

He was so eager for me to ask him about it that I almost didn’t have the heart not to. But I managed.

“Look at me, Simeon,” he finally said. “Do I look like a success?”

“Do you want me to say no? You’re doing okay. Take away most successes’ Piaget watches and they look like shoe salesmen. Dress a bum in Armani and spritz him with cologne, and he looks like the CEO of Gulf and Western.”

“Yeah, yeah, turn it into a joke. But do I look like a Hollywood success?”

“Somebody has to play people who look like you.”

“That’s what I did for years. Walked by in the background wearing a plaid shirt and carrying a bottle in a bag. Bumped into featured players in elevators. I had a three-year stretch where my longest line was ‘Oops.’ Now I’m a star. So what’s the difference?”

“I give.” I hate guessing.

“The Church.”

“The Church made you a star?”

“Sure it did. Of course it did. I’m only a TV star, I know that, but, Jesus, Simeon, do you know how much money I made last year?”

“Skippy,” I said, disappointing the people nearest to us, “there are a few secrets a man should keep.”

He clapped a hand guiltily over his mouth. “You’re right,” he said from behind it.

“But it’s the Church that made the difference,” I said by way of a prompt.

“Didn’t I say so?”

“Can we be specific, or is that against the rules?”

“There aren’t really any rules. It just gave me access to what I already had. I had the skills, I had the experience, the voice, I had all the resources it took to be successful. But I didn’t know how to get to them. It was like I was living in a diamond mine but I didn’t know what a diamond looked like.”

“At the risk of prolonging the metaphor, diamonds look like gray pebbles until they’re cut.”

“Yeah, and I kept picking up the wrong pebbles. Except there aren’t really any wrong pebbles, it all depends on what you want to do with them. If you’re going to throw one at a dog, it doesn’t have to be a diamond. It all depends on what the moment demands.”

“The moment.” We were close to the door now, and the hard white light bathed Skippy’s face like a second-rate special effect in an Old Testament movie. He looked like a tax collector about to be born again, bad casting for Saul of Tarsus.

“Do you have any idea how terrified I used to be in auditions?”

“No,” I said, “but I would be too.”

“I couldn’t look anybody in the eye. I couldn’t use my voice, I’d just mumble at the floor. I couldn’t find the experiences that would have brought the part to life. I was picking up all the wrong pebbles.”

“Good evening, Mr. Miller,” said a woman at the door whom I’d never seen before. “Good evening, Mr. Grist. Welcome to your first Revealing.”

Skippy beamed and we filed past. “Christ,” I said, “even Japan isn’t that efficient.”

“So the thing is,” Skippy continued as we went through the brilliant light, courtesy of half a dozen thousand-watt spots, and through a second door into the auditorium proper, “the thing is that I didn’t realize that everybody—all those casting directors and producers and directors—was in the moment with me and that the moment was in perfect harmony. And I had all my memories and all my experiences with me too.”

We were sloping down an aisle in a large hall that was already mostly full. Looking around, I realized that we hadn’t had to hurry; here, as in Orwell, some were more equal than others, although Skippy had missed it. A gray-suited Listener, or something, beckoned us to two seats down front. The stage had more flowers on it than the average gardener sees during the month of May. Bells tintinnabulated over the loudspeakers.

“The thing is,” Skippy said again, “that there’s no reason to be frightened by any situation if you know the moment is in harmony, and especially not if the other people
don’t
know it.” He counted on his fingers to make sure he had his verbs straight and then nodded. “All you have to do is key into the moment, surf it like a wave. It’s all going in one direction. If you try to fight it, like I used to do, you drown. If you paddle too hard, then you get ahead of it, like I also used to do, and you get slammed into the sand. Just sense it and you can glide down its surface, like the surfer and the wave.”

We were sitting, surrounded by people. The bells inspissated in the air. They sounded vaguely Tibetan.

“Swell,” I said. “What happens if it gets choppy?”

“What’s choppy? Everything’s choppy. Nobody’s ironed time for us to make it all smooth and starchy. A storm is just a succession of moments, and even that’s an illusion. There’s only one moment, now, and it and the storm are one. Nothing from the past should weigh you down. Nothing in the future should surprise you. It’s all one everlasting moment, and you’re already in balance with it. Do you think the ocean is surprised by the waves on its surface? All you have to do is let it carry you.”

Skippy laughed just as the lights dimmed. “You just ride on in,’ he said. A couple of people shushed him. When they recognized Skippy, they stopped shushing.

The lights on the stage were tremendous enough to make me wonder what the Church of the Eternal Moment’s electrical bills might be. A sober-looking individual in a dark suit welcomed us from behind a bleached pine podium. When he’d finished, a curtain behind him rose soundlessly and a sextet—guitar, piano, and four vocalists—went to work.

Their specialty was rewriting the hits. They started with “It Only Takes a Moment” and then segued into the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” with some minor reworking of the lyrics. Next to be butchered was the Stones’ “Time Is on My Side,” followed by a version of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” that I couldn’t follow at all. The general theme, though, was clearly time.

Skippy leaned over to me. “I’ve talked to them about the music,” he whispered. “This isn’t the good part.”

“I hope to Christ not. I’ve heard better in an elevator.”

“Just wait,” Skippy said.

After the music ground to a merciful end and the curtain came down again, consigning the sextet to whatever richly deserved purgatory awaited them, the lights refocused to reveal the dark-suited individual at his place behind the podium. Two ordinary folding chairs had been placed stage center.

“Please compose yourselves,” said the man at the podium as if he were trying to quell an irresistible mob impulse to dance in the aisles. “Make yourselves ready for the revealing.”

All around me I had the sense of people taking a deep breath and holding it. From stage left a slender woman in her late thirties came out. She was followed by a golden-haired girl with long Alice in Wonderland locks falling around her shoulders. Cradled in the little girl’s arms was a tiny gold kitten that matched her hair. The woman went to the podium and adjusted the microphone downward; she was much shorter than the man in the dark suit. The girl went straight to one of the chairs and sat down, facing out, with the kitten in her lap. She twisted one ankle behind the other nervously.

Applause rippled across the now-darkened auditorium.

The woman at the podium raised a hand. “Hello,” she said into the darkness.

“Hello, Mary Claire,” Skippy said. Skippy and about a thousand other people.

“Angel has an upset stomach tonight,” the woman said into the microphone. “What can I say? She’s a little girl.”

There was a wave of sympathetic laughter. Mary Claire waved it away cheerfully.

“So anyway, nothing may happen. For those of you who have seen Revealings before, and I guess that’s most of you, that should be no big deal. You know it doesn’t happen every time. For the others, well, we’re sorry. This isn’t a fast-food restaurant. You can’t always get a Big Mac here.”

A few people clapped manfully, but it had a disappointed sound to it.

The little girl clutched the kitten and looked at her mother out of bewildered eyes and then gazed out at the audience. More than anything else she reminded me of a puppy who’d done something wrong but didn’t know what it was.

“Poor baby,” I said to Skippy.

“It’s rough on her sometimes,” Skippy said, “but it’s worth it.”

“It’s worth it to you. What about her?”

“I’d trade places with her in a minute,” he said.

“If I’d had my way,” Mary Claire was saying in her amplified voice, “we wouldn’t have come onto the stage tonight. I’d have put my baby to bed. But she wouldn’t let me. There are a lot of people here, she said. Maybe something will happen. Didn’t you, Angel?”

Angel looked at her mother and nodded distantly. She seemed to be receding, growing smaller and more distant, like Alice after the second “Drink me.” Her dress was immaculate white, a blinding white that seemed somehow to make her hair even blonder. She was wearing white socks above flat black patent leather shoes. In all, she was a truly beautiful child.

“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Skippy said. It was the second time my mind had been read that evening. I felt like a library book; anybody could check me out.

“Even if nothing happens,” Mary Claire said, “we’ll meet you in the other room afterward. Or I will, anyway. Angel may not feel up to it. Are you okay, Angel?”

Angel was staring at her mother. Slowly she shook her head in the negative. Her jaw was hanging open.

Mary Claire looked at her watch. “We’ve been up here four minutes,” she said a little nervously. “If Angel doesn’t Speak in a minute, we’ll go back home. Five minutes is usually—”

Angel groaned. Her head lolled back and her right hand slipped from her lap and hung lifelessly at her side. The kitten looked right and left. Angel shuddered.

“You are the fisherman,” she said in a preternaturally deep voice. “And you are the lake.”

My neck prickled.

Mary Claire stepped away from the microphone and gave her daughter a concerned look. She might as well have been shooting at a rainbow; Angel wasn’t there anymore.

“You float on the skin of your past,” Angel said, her eyes wide and sightless, “suspended above the dark landscape below. There are hills there and valleys there. You created them but you’ve forgotten where they are.”

Her mouth moved in time with the words, but it wasn’t a little girl’s voice. And yet it
was
her voice, there could be no doubt about it.

“You cast your line down into the waters and you bring up small pieces of yourself. They are bright, silvery, and quick. But how many more shimmer away, how many escape, every time your line splashes into the water?”

“Hot shit,” Skippy whispered to himself.

“You must do more,” the voice speaking through Angel said. “You must learn the map of that invisible landscape below. It is the map of your life.”

“And a little child shall lead them,” someone said behind me.

“Why should they escape, those silvery ones?” Angel said. Her body was limp and lifeless. Her spine sagged against the hard back of the chair. Only the jaw seemed to be animated. It moved as though it had a life of its own. The kitten had jumped from her lap and strolled offstage.

“They escape because you throw your nets, you cast your hooks, into the past. There is no past. You know that and you’ve always known it. A baby knows it.

“The eternal moment is now. Only by existing in now, now and only now, can you command the power you need to deal with a world that will break you, defraud you, destroy you, if you let it. There are things you must cast away.

“You have baggage with you. Cast it away; you can’t fight with your hands full.”

Skippy sighed beside me.

“You have memories with you,” Angel droned on inexorably. “Cast them away; you can’t float on the moment when you are anchored in the past. That is what the Listeners are for. To help you chart your explorations, to receive your memories.

“You have commitments with you. Cast them away; you can’t diffuse your strength by fighting others’ battles. You can only give them one thing, the gift of example, the example of someone who can survive in the world.