Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (11 page)

“It pours,” Chantra said. “Do you know how much Listening costs?”

“What’s Listening?” Eleanor said.

“How much?” I asked.

“About two hundred dollars an hour. And it takes fifteen, twenty hours to move up from USDA choice to USDA prime, or whatever the grades are. And when you get to prime, you find out there are about ten more grades.”

“I asked a question,” Eleanor said. “What’s Listening? Is this something I could write about in the
Times?
”

“The
Times
!” I said.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Eleanor said, watching with a satisfied air as Dixie ate.

I silently counted to ten. “Didn’t you tell me what?”

“That I’ve been hired to write for the
Times
. The ‘Style’ section. On New Age phenomena. Every other week or so.”

“No,” I said, feeling affronted. “You didn’t.”

“Well, they called a couple of weeks ago,” Eleanor said dismissively.

“Good for you,” Chantra said around a mouthful of dessert.

“I guess it is. So what’s Listening?”

“Nothing that would interest the
Times
, I think,” I said. ”A little Jung, a little Freud, a little high-tech nonsense.” Chantra looked uncomfortable. “Get interrogated by a Listener a few dozen times, go into your past, find out what causes your knee-jerk reactions, and eliminate the Causes. That’s what they’re called, the Causes. Sometimes they’re experiences, sometimes they’re preconceptions. Sometimes they’re people. Once you’re free of them, you can begin to function in the eternal moment, which is now. Your past is your enemy, some rigmarole like that. You have to clear out your past before you can deal with the present.”

“Your past is your enemy,” Eleanor said. “What a perfect basis for fascism. It would give you a nice, comfortable moral high ground from which you could blow good-bye kisses to your ideals, your vows, your friends, even your family. So if the past is your enemy and the eternal moment is now, what about the future?”

“That comes later,” Dixie said, emerging from dessert. “Yuck, yuck.”

“Go back to sermons, Dixie,” I said.

“It’s like a sort of parody of confession,” Eleanor suggested.

“Yes and no.” Some of what I’d learned in my comparative-religions classes was coming back to me. I’d told my mother they’d be useful someday. “In confession the penitent accuses himself of sin in order to obtain absolution through the sacraments. But it’s only necessary to confess the big ones—the mortal sins—although there’s no harm in confessing venial sins. In Listening, as I understand it, the church member tells the Listener absolutely everything, from playing with matches to incest or murder, and the idea is to bring these hidden or forgotten—or repressed—experiences into the present, to deprive them of their power to shape your actions. Those are the Causes. Once you’ve illuminated them and the hidden landscape of your life, to paraphrase the only Revealing I’ve heard, you can deal with the present
in
the present, without dragging along harmful or irrelevant debris from your past.”

“Whew,” Dixie said. “I wish I’d said that.”

“Also,” Chantra said, “confession isn’t humiliating. From what I’ve heard, a Listening session can be pretty humiliating.”

“They could still have picked that up from the Catholics. In the early days of the Church, people sometimes confessed publicly,” I said, “for the express purpose of self-humiliation. Remember, these were people who sometimes got dressed up in hair shirts and hit themselves with whips.”

“Imagine your confessions being public,” said Eleanor, who had less to confess than anyone I’d ever known.

“Well, in the Church of the Eternal Moment the whole point is secrecy,” Chantra said. “Listening sessions are supposed to give you an absolutely confidential opportunity to work through your past mistakes.”

“What about the little girls?” That was Eleanor.

“The Speakers?” Chantra said. “They’re channels for Alon or Aton, however they’re spelling it these days. They seem to be normal little girls when they’re not Speaking. After a while they burn out or something, and go back to their movie magazines.”

“Wait,” Eleanor said. “You mean there’s no permanent leader of the Church?”

“Actually, that’s one of the reassuring things about it,” Chantra said. “There’s no one figure, like L. Ron Hubbard for Scientology or the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh running around buying fleets of ships or Rolls-Royces with the proceeds of the church. There’s just these little girls, Speaking as long as the spirit possesses them, and then moving on.”

“Somebody’s keeping the books,” I said.

“Honey, somebody’s making millions,” Chantra said. “Somebody bought that big old hotel they use as their headquarters downtown and somebody built that television studio next door where they do their cable show. Somebody’s franchising the new churches and moving all that money around. But whoever he or she is, he or she keeps a low profile. Like the Hunts. But as far as the faithful are concerned, it’s a little girl, her mother, and whatever the hell Aton is.”

“This is so cockamamie I can’t believe it,” Dixie said. “You mean people actually have faith in something that’s run by a bunch of little girls and somebody who’s dead?”

“There have been weirder faiths,” I said. “Automatism, for example.”

“There was never anything called automatism,” Eleanor said hopefully.

“Automatism is a twentieth-century belief, like the Church of the Eternal Moment. I’m sure this century isn’t any weirder than any of the earlier ones, but we’ve forgotten a lot of the earlier aberrations. Automatists believe that man is a technological being, and that technological skill is what God gave man to set him apart from animals.”

“I thought that was blushing,” Dixie said.

“The automatists say that man will reach his height when he invents the machine that controls him. Or her,” I added apologetically.

“Don’t worry about sexist language in this context,” Chantra said. “That’s men talking.”

“Computers?” Eleanor cast a hostile glance at her Macintosh, temporarily banished to the coffee table.

“Whatever. Faith is a peculiar thing.”

“How would you define faith?” Chantra asked.

“I wouldn’t even try. St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, says that faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ In the Church of the Eternal Moment, I’d say that the things hoped for are wealth, power, and a sense of self. The things not seen are Aton.”

“And the management of the Church,” Eleanor said.

“Bingo,” I said.

“Just be careful with the Church of the Eternal Moment,” Chantra said. From what I’ve heard, people have a way of going in and not coming out.”

“From what I’ve seen,” I said, “they sometimes come out dead.”

“Sounds like the
Times
to me,” Eleanor said stubbornly.

I looked at her for so long that Dixie burped twice. “Maybe it is,” I said.

Chapter 11

“A
re you sure this is the right place?” Eleanor said again.

The Congregation of the Present occupied a flyspecked one-story storefront wedged appropriately between the temporal parentheses of an open elementary school and a closed funeral parlor on a run-down block of Vermont Avenue. The flat-black asphalt and yellow swings of the school playground were slick with rain, and the funeral parlor’s ragged hedges had snagged pounds of bright paper trash. I wondered how a funeral parlor could have gone out of business.

The Congregation squinted at the world through oily windows. Its derelict air was only partly relieved by a large and presumably symbolic sign that depicted an Egyptian pyramid incongruously balancing what seemed to be a stopwatch at its apex. The stopwatch, in orange neon, perpetually counted down the last fifteen seconds before eternity, and then, at eternity minus one, repositioned its second hand. The idea that eternity was negotiable provided the sole note of optimism.

There was no traffic at all. Even at four p.m. on a gray, rainwashed Sunday afternoon it seemed to me there should have been more.

Eleanor had asked her question the first time we circled the block, and now she peered through the window, furrows of worry lining her flawless forehead. “Why are they here? If religions make so much money, what are these people doing here?”

“Waiting for a bigger piece of the pie,” I said, using an expression I knew she hated.

“Don’t
say
that. It reduces the whole world to calories.”

“Well, then, they’re anticipating upward mobility,” I said, looking for a parking space. “Demonstrating their faith. Think about the early Christians. Their sign was a drawing of a fish, carved in wood, not in neon. They met in dripping catacombs beneath the ground, in secret. If you’d been an early Roman real-estate agent, what odds would you have given that they’d eventually own the Vatican?”

“Anyway,” Eleanor said, changing arguments as I maneuvered Alice into a microscopic slot between a Hyundai and a Hyundai, yet more evidence that the Koreans shall inherit the earth, “I think you’ve finally closed the door on whatever’s left of your common sense. Impersonating a reporter? Don’t you know that reporters are the only privileged class left in America?”

“Not quite,” I said. “There are feminists.”

“A laugh a line,” she said.

“Besides, half the people who are real reporters are impersonating a reporter. Look at network anchors. You, at least, have a real press pass.”

“I’m a writer, not a reporter,” Eleanor said. “And this is Sunday. I should be correcting book galleys. Are you aware that this is Sunday?”

“Churches are open on Sunday, Eleanor. Remember?”

“I wasn’t talking about the church. I was talking about you and me. Simeon, what the hell are we doing here?”

“We’re going to ask these nice folks about the Church of the Eternal Moment. We’re going to get a jaundiced view, to put it mildly. The Congregation of the Present, according to Chantra, is a grudge-carrying spin-off of the original Church, and they think they’re talking to an L.A.
Times
reporter who just might nail the Church to the floor with a well-chosen adjective or two while making the Congregation look like the most reverent gathering since the Last Supper. Haven’t we been over this before?”

“Judas was at the Last Supper.”

“Every hostess makes a mistake once in a while.”

“I’m not a detective,” she said. “I’ve never wanted to be a detective. I didn’t even want
you
to be a detective. Why did I let you talk me into this?”

“Why ask me? Do I know how your mind works? Have I
ever
known how your mind works?” I killed the engine, hoping I’d be able to bid it to rise again. “It’s just this once, Eleanor. It won’t kill you.”

“Says you.”

“Have you got your notebook?”

“If you ask me one more time whether I’ve got my notebook, I’m going to throw it out the window.”

“Let’s go, then.” I reached across her and opened her door, less out of courtesy than from a conviction that she wouldn’t get out at all if I didn’t. She made a harrumphing sound and stepped out, directly into the path of the first moving automobile we’d seen in ten minutes. Its driver honked, swerved theatrically, and made a rude hand sign at us.

“Don’t get killed yet,” I said, getting out. “I’d just have to get a replacement, and I don’t know where I could find anyone else dumb enough.”

She stepped up onto the curb and straightened her skirt fussily. “You look very establishment,” I said. “Just right for a card-carrying lackey of the imperialist running-dog press.”

“Put a cork in the banter,” Eleanor said shortly, “and let’s get it over with.”

The door to the Congregation of the Present swung open in front of us, revealing an empty waiting room. The congregation was evidently elsewhere. A bedraggled hanging arrangement of long neon tubes, trailing frayed-looking electrical wires, hummed at us and provided flat, cold light. The walls were a pale, sickly institutional green, bare except for two large and somewhat faded photographs of a woman and a little girl—not Angel and Mary Claire Ellspeth—and the floor was a hodgepodge of scuffed brown linoleum, warped and buckled in places. Here and there the linoleum had peeled away altogether, revealing the concrete slab beneath. A bucket in a near corner caught the slow drip of water that had collected on the roof.

“Very nice,” Eleanor said. “We must spend more Sundays together. Your Los Angeles is so picturesque.”

“Look intelligent,” I said. “You’re on
Candid Camera
. Don’t look around for it. It’s in the far corner, up near the ceiling.”

“Gee,” she said, giving me a big mean smile. “I hope my seams are straight.”

“Make a note. Glance around inquiringly and write something in your notebook. And don’t overact.”

Eleanor opened her spiral binder and uncapped her pen with her perfect white teeth, SIMEON IS A SCHMUCK, she wrote. As she snapped the pad shut, a door slid open beneath the television camera and an enormous woman came in.

“Good afternoon and welcome to our home,” she said, looking dourly from Eleanor to me. “I’m Sister Zachary. May I help you?” Sister Zachary was as big as a split-level house and she had draped her bulk in something that looked like a dust cover for a couch. White and flowing, it swept the dirty floor as she approached us. It was the first time the floor had been swept in some time.

“This is Miss Chan, from the
Times
,” I said. “She’s here to see Dr. Wilburforce.”

Sister Zachary had a small dark mustache above tight, disapproving lips. She regarded Eleanor over it for a moment, then nodded reluctant acknowledgment and turned to me. “And you are?”

“My associate,” Eleanor interposed, “Mr. Swinburne.”

“That’s an unusual name,” Sister Zachary said grudgingly. “Are you related to the poet?”

“Very distantly. Not as distantly as I’d like, I’m afraid.” Eleanor knew that I loathed Swinburne above all other poets, and that was saying quite a lot.

“Dr. Wilburforce is waiting for you, although I must say he was only expecting one.” Her pursed little mouth turned down at the corners briefly and then she tugged it back up into a stiff, creaky smile of welcome. “Still, I suppose it’ll be all right. Will you please follow me?” She swayed left as a preparation for turning, swayed back to the right to overcome inertia, and then launched herself back toward the door. Eleanor scrawled a note;
yikes
, it said.

“Where’s the congregation?” she asked Sister Zachary’s back as the Sister slid the door open.

“We’re between services,” Sister Zachary said without turning around. “The next gathering is at six.”

“How many gatherings each day?” Eleanor pushed imperiously in front of me to go through the door first. I followed like a good dachshund.

“There used to be four,” Sister Zachary said. Her voice was a bit wistful. “Now there are only two.”

“And why is that?”

“Faith is falling off, don’t you know,” the fat lady said over her shoulder. We were trailing in single file down a narrow hallway with pasteboard walls, an obvious architectural gerrymander that skirted the large room to our left, where the worshipers, or what was left of them, gathered for devotions. Sister Zachary’s ample hips brushed the walls on either side. “It’s not just the Congregation,” she added defensively. “It’s the national climate. Young people don’t believe in anything anymore.”

“Are you hurt by not having a Speaker?” I tugged sharply at Eleanor’s hair to slow her down. Speakers were supposed to come later.

“Oh, no. Certainly not. You mustn’t think that. We don’t need show business”—she made the words sound so dirty that they should have been printed, Victorian-style, in asterisks—“to keep belief alive. What’s true once is true for all time. Anna was speaker enough for us.”

“But—” Eleanor said. I yanked her hair again, harder this time, and nearly got caught by Sister Zachary, who pivoted more rapidly than I would have believed possible. Eleanor rubbed the back of her head. I lowered my hand quickly, feeling like an elementary-school kid forced to palm an exceptionally large spitball. “This is Dr. Wilburforce’s office,” Sister Zachary said with tremendous dignity, knocking twice at a gray steel door. In my limited experience with religious leaders, it seemed that many of them preferred to work behind steel doors.

Something rumbled inside, and Sister Zachary pulled the heavy door open with no apparent effort. “I’ll leave you here,” she said. “Dr. Wilburforce will answer all your questions.” The words were unequivocal but the tone was hopeful.

“Come,” someone growled, British-fashion, through the open door. We went. The door remained ajar behind us.

The room, although largely empty, was bigger than I’d expected. So was Dr. Wilburforce. He rose from behind a scarred and notched wooden desk positioned strategically in front of a rainwashed window, laying down a thick book. We were obviously supposed to have interrupted his reading. Dr. Wilburforce had a generous expanse of stomach confined rebelliously inside a tweed vest, a none-too-clean shirt with curling collars, and an intriguing map of veins to guide the determined pilgrim from one of his wine-spotted cheeks to the other, across the Himalayas of the biggest, reddest nose I’d ever seen. He topped it all off with a high forehead, long, lank, straight brown hair, and disconcertingly wary black eyes.

“So you’re the reporter from the
Times
,” he said to Eleanor, summoning up a respiratory eruption that fell somewhere between a chuckle and catarrh. “I must say that I didn’t know journalists were so pretty these days.”

Eleanor waved an apologetic hand at me. “You should see him before he washes his hair,” she said. “I’m Eleanor Chan, Dr. Wilburforce. This is my assistant, Algernon Swinburne. Have a seat, Algy.”

Ignoring the demotion and the new first name, I sat. “Related to the poet?” Dr. Wilburforce said with leaden geniality.

“Intimately,” Eleanor said.

“The song of springtide,” Dr. Wilburforce said, smiling to expose a breathtakingly white set of false choppers. “Psalms of innocence and hope. They have so much to tell us, especially in this age.”

“Don’t they just?” Eleanor said. “Algy knows them by heart.” She sat down next to me, dodging my kick without missing a beat. “It’s so kind of you to find time for us.”

Dr. Wilburforce gestured with vague regret at his book. “Ah, well,” he said. “We can’t scorn the media. It’s the lubricant of a free society.”

Eleanor flipped open her notebook and wrote swill. “May we quote you?” she asked.

“But of course, my dear. I know that nothing is off the record these days.” He raised a hand to pluck at the hairs that joined his eyebrows over the bridge of his formidable nose. “At any rate, we have no secrets here.”

“Really?” Eleanor said. “Most religions have their mysteries.”

“Mysteries are the refuge of a weak belief,” Dr. Wilburforce said with the air of one who’d just successfully steered the conversation to a long-planned punch line. He laced his fingers together over his vest, rose suddenly onto his toes, and then plopped down onto a corner of the desk. It groaned.

“No mumbo-jumbo?” Eleanor said.

He gave us the polyethylene smile again. “Whatever little bit of mumbo we may have here,” he said playfully, “it isn’t jumbo.” He watched his bon mot float across the air toward us and then collected his features into an expression of High Seriousness. “You understand that I’m being completely frank with you. People like a little theater with their religion.”

“Why is that?” I said, just to say something. I was beginning to feel like an extra chair.

“Ah, Mr. Swinburne. You, of all people, you, with the poet’s blood flowing proudly through your veins, should understand. Religion itself is a mystery, an attempt to penetrate the veils of time and mortality and impose reason upon them. Do you, as we say, play the market?”

I was surprised in spite of myself. “Only on paper.”

“Then you listen occasionally to the analysts. Stocks are up, they say, because we’re headed for war. Stocks are down because people
think
we’re headed for war. The analysts are wrong most of the time, but investors, or even would-be investors like you, listen to them because they provide the market with a mystique, one that you believe you eventually may learn to understand. Without them, you wouldn’t dare to invest—I don’t mean you personally, of course, since I hardly know you—because you’d have to face the fact that the market moves irrationally and at random, without any reference at all to human factors. Like the universe. The universe may or may not know we’re here, but it certainly doesn’t behave as though it cares.”

“So you’re in stocks?” I said. “What looks good?”

“If the Universe moves at random,” Eleanor said, cutting off what I’d thought was an interesting line of inquiry, “then what possible good is religion?”