Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (7 page)

“You have your past with you. Cast it away. Become born in the eternal moment, the moment of now.”

Except for the stretched, contorted voice, the hall was absolutely silent. No one coughed, no one shuffled his feet.

“There are devils in the world,” Angel said. “They’re not supernatural. They look like you and me. They
are
you and me.” People cast sidelong looks at each other. “They’re people who are stretched beyond their breaking point, people who are held together only by their skin, people who are trying to sustain the burden of their past, of all their pasts, in a world that exists only in the present.

“They are people who haven’t learned to cast away the Four Last Things: possessions, memories, others, one’s self— one’s past self. Pity them.”

Mary Claire had moved noiselessly across the stage to sit in the chair to her daughter’s left. She looked worried.

“Your past is your enemy,” Angel said. Her legs shivered, and suddenly she sat upright. Mary Claire put a hand on her shoulder but her daughter didn’t feel it.

“You agonize,” Angel said in a new and louder voice. Someone sobbed behind me. “You agonize because there are things in your past, things you’ve done, things you haven’t done, things that were done to you.

“Release them.

“You feel inadequate. You feel inadequate because you are weighed down, chained down, with hopes, with fears, with old conceptions of your past. You’re wrapped in a cocoon, the cocoon of your past.

“Break free from the cocoon.

“You are frightened.”

Someone cried out, “I am.”

“I can feel it,” Angel said, “you
are
frightened. You are frightened because you can’t look the moment in the eye. You can’t look the moment in the eye because you’re standing in a hole, the hole you’ve dug for yourself, the hole of your past, and you don’t know how to step out of it.

“Step up, step out of it.” Her arms lifted as though pulled upward by strings and crisscrossed in benediction.

“The moment is all,” the voice said through her mouth. “The moment is harmonious. The moment is in perfect balance. The moment is a cross section of all that was, that is, and that will be. It is the pause between breathing out and breathing in. Without it there is no past, no present, no future. Everything is here. It is here now. Right now. You can learn to meet it. You are already in perfect balance with it. You just don’t know it.

“Release yourself. Break free. Step up. Step up into the moment. Say good-bye to the Four Last Things and say hello to yourself. Say hello to the world as it really is. Say hello to power and fulfillment and satisfaction and perfect love.

“We can show you how.

“We can give you the key to the moment. It’s so simple.” She made a guttural sound that might have been a laugh.

“The key to the moment is the key to the world.”

The little girl collapsed back into her chair and her eyes fluttered and then closed. Her mother placed a hand on her daughter’s forehead and then got up and hurried to the microphone.

“That’s all,” she said. “I’m worried about Angel’s stomach.”

Two men in dark clothing came out and helped the little girl from her chair under Mary Claire’s watchful eyes. Angel sagged between them as they guided her from the chair. Her head rolled back as though her neck were broken.

A murmur rolled through the auditorium. Skippy turned to me and placed a hand on my arm.

“Wow,” he said reverently.

I looked around. People were watching the progress of the mother, the little girl, and the little girl’s … the little girl’s what? “Pallbearers” was the only word that came to mind. I turned back to Skippy.

“No shit,” I said.

Chapter 7

A
bsolutely everything was for sale. The room adjoining the auditorium was jammed full of tables, and each table was stacked with books, pamphlets, cassette tapes, and posters of Angel and Mary Claire. We’d been given a tote bag when we entered the room, and I stood next to Skippy, watching the church members drop the items into their bags like women at a hosiery sale. Nothing so vulgar as money changed hands; the people paid by waving their room keys.

Skippy seemed subdued. He’d acknowledged a few greetings from people he didn’t seem to know very well, but other than that he’d said nothing since the Revealing ended.

“What is it?” I said.

“I wish you hadn’t said that, about it being hard on her. Usually she doesn’t seem to mind, but tonight I almost felt like she was fighting it.” He looked around the room. A number of people had gathered around a table with a couple of industrial-size metal coffee urns on it. They were sipping from Styrofoam cups and chewing on pastries. “Most of the time she seems to enjoy it,” he said. “She says she enjoys it.”

“Skippy, how long have you been involved in the Church?”

“About five years.”

“And she’s how old, twelve?”

“I guess.”

“So she’s been doing this since she was seven at least?”

He looked bewildered for a moment. Then his face cleared. “No, no,” he said.  “I forgot, you don’t know anything about it. She’s the third Speaker. There were two before her,” he added, helping me with my math.

“What happened to them?”

A heavyset woman with such round cheeks that she looked like she was carrying a week’s supply of nuts in them came up to us and shyly asked Skippy for his autograph. Looking simultaneously pleased and distracted, he wrote his name on her tote bag. She blushed appreciatively and headed for the pastry table.

‘‘What?” he said absently.

“What happened to the other two?”

“They stopped Speaking,” he said. “It happens after a while. It’ll happen to Angel in a year or two.”

“And then what?”

“Some other little girl will start to Speak.”

“They’ve all been girls?”

“Sure,” he said a little impatiently. “Look it up, it’s all in the books. The Speakers change but the Voice remains the same.”

“And what’s the Voice?”

“The Voice gives the Church direction. It’s always the same Voice. It’s a Spirit, Simeon,” he said. “Its name is Aton, or Alon in the first Revealings. The first Speaker, poor little Anna, had a cleft palate, she couldn’t say her T’s, and all the early writings called it Alon. See, the writings come through the Speaker, and they’re spoken onto tape and then written down, so the first writings got it wrong. But the Voice is the same, and it doesn’t seem to care what you call it. I’ve heard two Speakers, and they sounded pretty much alike. If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is listen to the cassettes. They’re only nineteen-ninety-five. And the content, of course, the content is the same from Speaker to Speaker.”

“Aton is Egyptian. The God of the Sun.”

“The voice is American. It’s told us that, it’s said that it was an American last time around.”

“Can we get some coffee?” I was beginning to feel like I weighed six hundred pounds. I hadn’t slept much since Sally Oldfield was killed.

“I’ve got some whiskey in my pocket,” Skippy said unexpectedly. “You want to step outside?”

Back out in the parking lot, Skippy shivered in the breeze as he pulled out a silver hip flask that could have dated from the twenties. “Glenfiddich,” he said. “About a hundred years old and smoked over peat bogs or something.” He handed it to me first.

I’m not a whiskey drinker, but the first sip converted me. It was warm and smoky and smoother than an Irish lie. I felt a red line of heat, like a thermometer in reverse, snake down from my throat to my belly button.

“I knew there was a reason for grain,” I said, “other than roughage I mean.” I handed it back. The world looked a lot better. The cypresses, black against the spangling of stars, achieved the spiral harmony Van Gogh had painted. Skippy gulped twice and then burped.

“This is a no-no,” he said, wiping his mouth and giving the flask back. “No drinking during the retreat.”

“I thought there weren’t any rules.”

“Normally there aren’t. But this thing, this retreat, is like a fat farm for the consciousness. Just like you’re not supposed to slip away to Winchell’s for a doughnut while you’re losing weight, you’re not supposed to cloud your consciousness while you’re here.”

I took a much longer swig this time. The flask held more than I’d thought. “Sounds reasonable,” I said, swallowing. “Are you sure this stuff is legal?”

I was positive that Skippy’s answer made sense, but it was hard to make it out around the neck of the flask, which was lodged between his lips. I hadn’t eaten in hours, and I felt suddenly light-headed. “Damnaroonies,” I said. “Gimme that.”

He did. This time I was the one who burped. I tried to hand the flask back, but Skippy was looking at his watch and I almost dropped it. “Any minute now, she should be coming in,” he said.

“Who?”

“Angel. And Mary Claire. Don’t you want to see them?”

Since I still had the flask, I took another swipe at it. “Sure, I want to see them. Let’s go.”

“Just a minute.” Skippy turned the flask to a ninety-degree angle and drained it. “You know,” he said confidingly, “as a great statesman and drinker once said, there is some shit up with which I will not put. That’s Winston Churchill, when some twit tried to edit his prose. Why shouldn’t a sentence end with a preposition?”

“Every sentence has to end somewhere,” I said. “Unless you’re Marcel Proust.”

“Prowst. I always pronounced it Prowst.”

“Well, he’s dead anyway. Are we going in, or what?”

“In,” Skippy said, shoving the flask back into his pocket. “About the shit I won’t put up with, though. I mean, why shouldn’t I drink? In moderation, of course.”

“That goes without saying.” I hiccupped. “Moderation is the important thing.” Skippy laughed. Together we wove our way back into the hall.

It seemed brighter and noisier than when we’d left it. Also a lot more cheerful. The whiskey hummed a little Irish jig in my veins.

“So what happens to them?”

“Who?” Skippy said, squinting in the light. He was making a slightly erratic line for the pastries, with me trailing behind.

“The ones who stop Speaking.”

“They grow up, I guess. Well, one of them, anyway. The first speaker, Anna Klein, she and her mother got killed a few years back. Automobile crash. They were on their way to one of the Church’s cable broadcasts—did you know the Church has its own cable show?”

“No. How would I? I don’t watch TV.”

“Well, they were driving down from Yosemite, where they lived, she and her mother, I mean, and they blew a tire on the Grapevine. On the long downhill. Totaled. Terrible thing. You want a bear claw?”

“I’ll take the whole bear.” Skippy lurched around to hand me a pastry and succeeded in mashing it against my hand. “Oops,” he said.

“Gee, you still remember your line. Were they alone in the car?”

“Yeah, I think so. Let me get you another one.”

“That’s okay. My stomach doesn’t know what it’s supposed to look like. Whose fault was it?”

Skippy’s face was red enough to make Listener Dooley give him a hard look from across the table. Dooley’s whiskey nose quivered like a divining rod.

“Whose fault was what? The bear claw?”

“No. The accident. The bear claw was John Barleycorn’s fault.” I gave Listener Dooley a winning smile. “Great pastries,” I said. “My compliments to the chef.”

Skippy said, “The accident was the tire’s fault.”

Dooley twitched audibly and Skippy followed my gaze. ‘“Evening, Listener,” he said genially. “What, no coffee?”

Dooley’s little raisin eyes were nuggets of suspicion. “Mr. Miller ” he began grimly, “alcohol is not …“I put a hand on Skippy’s arm to steer him elsewhere.

A celesta rang out. Everyone looked at the far end of the room.

The bells were struck again and the crowd parted to admit Angel and Mary Claire. Both of them had changed clothes, the mother into a simple dark dress, and Angel into a sky-blue middy blouse with matching skirt. Her dazzling blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail now, and she looked like any other beautiful little girl. She held on to her mother’s arm as though the presence of all the adults made her feel shy. She’d left the kitten backstage. There were four men with them, dressed alike in vaguely naval white jackets and dark trousers. A shimmer of coral behind them drew my eye, and I saw Dr. Merryman following along in their wake.

“I guess her stomach’s better,” Skippy said. “See, Simeon, she doesn’t look like she’s been through anything terrible.”

“Who are the Gilbert-and-Sullivan sailors?”

“Ushers. They’re supposed to take care of Mary Claire and Angel. Just in case of crazies, you know?”

People were pressing in on them now, squeezing past the Ushers to greet Angel and thank her for the Revealing. A couple of them shook her hand. Mary Claire’s hand fell protectively onto her daughter’s shoulder, but Angel ignored it. She exchanged polite words with the adults, and when a girl her own age came up to her, a friend, apparently, she whispered something and giggled.

“I want to meet them,” I said.

“Sure,” Skippy said, “no problem.” We started toward them.

“What do I call her?”

“What do you mean? You think she’s the Queen Mother or something? When she’s not Speaking she’s just a little kid. Call her Angel.”

We were about ten feet from them when something behind us fell with a loud crash. I turned quickly to see the heavyset woman who’d asked for Skippy’s autograph, looking mortally embarrassed in front of an overturned table of books. She and two Listeners started to pick them up. When I looked back at Angel, she was surrounded by a white wall of Ushers, as alert as Secret Service men, standing shoulder to shoulder. Merryman had one hand on Mary Claire’s shoulder and the other on Angel’s. His face was set and hard.

“Come on,” Skippy said. “The emergency’s over.”

Merryman caught sight of us as we approached and he relaxed into a pointy-toothed smile. “Ah, Skippy,” he said, “I see you found Simeon.”

“How’s Angel?” Skippy asked.

“Fine. Too many french fries. She and her mother went into the McDonald’s in Carmel this afternoon, and Angel, as they put it these days, pigged out. Have you enjoyed yourself, Simeon?”

“It’s been very instructive, Dick.” The electricity between us was so negative that if we’d been hanging from the ceiling on wires we’d have flown apart.

“You’ll want to say hello to Angel,” he said. “And Mary Claire, of course.”

Mary Claire gave me a grave smile and a cool hand. Up close there was something coarse and worn about her. Her hair wasn’t quite clean, and there was a slack looseness to her full lips. Angel was chatting animatedly with Skippy, asking him something about the young male lead on his show, but when Merryman touched her shoulder she looked up politely.

“Angel Ellspeth, this is Simeon Grist. This was Simeon’s first Revealing, Angel.”

“Pleased to meetcha,” Angel said in a voice that was pure New York. “Didja like it?”

I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d sung the bass aria from
Aïda
. If I’d had my back turned I would have thought it was a joke, Skippy imitating the Dead End Kids in falsetto.

“Yes,” was the best I could manage at first. Then I said, “Did
you
like it?”

“Sure,” she said, pronouncing it “shooah.” She looked puzzled at the question.

“What does it feel like when you Speak?”

“Great.” She gave me a broad smile. “It’s like I got a really good friend, you know?”

“Do you remember what you said?”

“Never,” Merryman said. “It’s ironic. Angel is the only person in the room who doesn’t hear the Revealing.”

We smiled at each other over how ironic it was.

“I listen later, onna tape,” Angel said in the voice of a castrato Manhattan cabdriver. “I got a little Walkman, I play it on that.” She looked up at her mother. “I don’t get a lot of it, though.”

“We learn about the Church through Revealings, of course,” Merryman said, “but we learn about ourselves through Listening, and children don’t begin Listening sessions until they’re ten. Even though they’re spoken through her, the Revealings are a little advanced for her.” He threw me the smile again. I didn’t throw it back.

“Hell,” Skippy said, looking apprehensively from Merryman to me and back again. “They’re advanced for me.”

Angel tugged at her mother’s arm. Mary Claire leaned down, and Angel whispered something in her ear. Merryman watched them closely.

Mary Claire raised a hand. People stopped talking at once. “Angel’s tired now” she said. “I’ve got to put her to bed. Please stay and enjoy yourselves. Over on Table Ten, by the way, are tapes of the First Revealing, through poor little Anna. This is the first time they’ve been available in some time. Thank you all for coming.”

The Ushers closed ranks around them, and Angel, Mary Claire, and Merryman went back the way they’d come. I found myself looking at the back of Angel’s slender neck, bared by the upsweep of the pony tail. It was a neck made for the headsman’s ax.

“Hey, the time,” Skippy said. “Your plane is at when?”

“Ten,” I said, watching them go. Angel had hold of her mother’s hand.

“You’d better roll. Unless you’d like to stay here, I mean. I’ve got an extra bed in my cottage. I’ve also got some more Glenfiddich. You could sit up and chat with Dr. Merryman, you seem to like him so much.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got an early morning, and it’ll be better if the clock goes off in L.A.”

He walked me out to the rented car. As I sat there fiddling with the controls and trying to remember how the damn thing started, he cleared his throat meaningfully and I looked up at him.

“So,” he said. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No.” I gave the steering wheel a half-twist and turned the key again. This time the engine caught. “I think I am.”