Truly Like Lightning
Page 42
Her genuine gratitude seemed to baffle and annoy Malouf more than her diffidence and anger. He frowned, giving up on her once and for all, and swung his chair to face the ocean again, his back to her. Over his shoulder, he made a dismissive gesture for Maya to leave, to get the fuck out. She watched the back of his head tilt forward to the window and imagined that the ocean, his nemesis, was cursing him now as well, taunting him with his severed finger and mortality. But still, she knew he must be grinning, sure that he was winning, winning all the battles on the way to losing the war. As she walked out, she heard him whisper to himself, to the ocean, and maybe to his version of a God, “Nine men mean nothing.”
On the way home, Maya thought about what she could do. She thought about a lawyer, hell, she thought about becoming a lawyer—she was young enough, though she felt decades older than a year ago. She thought about writing, not horror films, but real films about real people doing real things, maybe documentaries; she thought about teaching. Nine men were dead, many more were still alive. She needed to make amends, atone for the damage she had caused by her hunger for money and safety, her ambition, and her innocence. The future was wide open, but its direction was clear. It pointed back to helpfulness, gratitude, responsibility. Circuitous how we come to a kind of religion after all—mysterious ways and all that, she thought. Her anger at Malouf, her confusion and sadness at the tragedy of Bronson, morphed into a type of jangly feeling of freedom. She realized Malouf had stolen her phone. More freedom.
Instead of heading back for the phone, or home, Maya steered the Tesla toward the 10 freeway and its 2,460 miles that didn’t stop till Florida across the entire country, clear from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Yeah, she’d have to recharge every 300 miles or so, and that wasn’t entirely free, but right now she could go anywhere, be anything; she had molted her form like the snake on her arm, was as limitless now as this great American highway. Bronson had taught her that. The art of radical reinvention. He had forsaken the world to escape himself, and his tragedy was that he found himself, in the shadows of the Joshua tree, waiting out there in the desert, too. He could no more restore the biblical past than he could escape his own past.
Bronson’s vision was faulty, human, but his reach was divine. Maya had learned something from him, everything. The holy act of restoration, reclaiming lost times, and proclaiming that the present matters and miracles can still occur—she learned all that from a mass murderer. Whatever happened from here on out, whatever she did and whoever she became, she would dedicate silently to the doomed expansiveness at the heart of Bronson Powers. The West was done, burning out, over and out; Bronson had feared that, too, he just hadn’t known when to let go. She would let go. There was nothing left for her in LA. She would head east.
The smoke from the Joshua Tree Fire had turned the LA sunset sky a burnt smoky peach that stung her eyes. She pointed her planet-friendly electric vehicle straight east on the 10 toward the source of the still dangerous wildfire. Mary and Yaya and the Powers kids, including Hyrum, were with Yalulah Ballou’s old Yankee family in Providence, Rhode Island. The plain Jane, prodigal Wasp daughter had returned home to her Mayflower-pedigree folks, with an eye-talian, pill-popping, pistol-packing wife and a bunch of wild Mormon kids in tow. Okeydoke. From culture shock to culture shock. Diet Coked–up little Sammy Greenbaum should take a stab at writing that story, she mused.
The young Powers children would be given new names and raised with as much privacy as they could achieve in the state that began as a penal colony and guarantor of religious freedom, Rogue’s Island. Ah, the true American story of genocide, slavery, and rape hidden beneath the beautiful, obfuscating, July Fourth words. Those kids had been through a lot and had a long hard road ahead of them, but as Janet Bergram might say—they are loved, and that’s a start.
At seventeen, Deuce would soon be in Boston, the cradle of the Revolution, at Harvard. Deuce had actually called her last week to make sure she was okay. He said there’s only one trinity worth addressing, one that consists of capitalism, racism, and climate change, and like the Holy Trinity, he felt that those three issues are at base one in the same, and that he hoped to find the common root and yank it from the American soil. He got to talking about universal income, “data dignity,” and “unionizing the internet”; he was going to take a French-language intensive this summer so he could read Thomas Piketty and de Tocqueville in “the original.” The kid’s learning curve was a vertical line. She had no idea what he was lit up about, but his empathetic zeal, his humble certainty, filled her with hope nonetheless. She felt some small solace that a boy like that was coming of age in this world.
In a few months, Pearl would be in New York City at Juilliard, although Maya didn’t think any school could hold on to her for very long. Pearl and the Big Apple. Maya smiled at that marriage to the only city commensurate with that young girl’s talent and ambition. Both children were a testament to Bronson’s original vision. He had filled them with the past to transform the present, to be themselves the latter-day saints and miracles.
For today, though, she would drive toward disaster. There were many people there that needed succor. The children of San Bernardino who were going to lose a good advocate in Janet Bergram, the Ruiz family, the families of the men Bronson had killed, the family of cops, the family of the park rangers, those hurting from the conflagration still burning. Loss, loss, everywhere loss. She must give the loss meaning. It was her only hope. She had a sudden, vivid memory of her grandmother, the worn rosary beads sliding through her arthritic fingers. “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”
She would mourn, yes, and she would make atonement for her blindness, pride, and greed to the living, not to the God of Mammon, nor to a God that sent a man alone into a desert and put stones on his eyes to see. Her eyes were open and clear; she would make amends by giving away the strength of her blood, youth, intelligence, sweat, and her love, not by some useless bloodletting, symbolic or otherwise. She had seen the perfect face of God, experienced His appetite for obedience and death, and she would turn away from Him now to His banished children, to the imperfect face of man, and woman, and all living, suffering things. She would risk her soul to save it. She merged onto the freeway, put her foot down, and headed straight into the fire.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE GENESIS OF THIS story began years ago when I read Harold Bloom on the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith. I had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of studying with Professor Bloom when I was a graduate student in English literature at Yale in the mid- to late ’80s. His was a unique and comprehensive mind. He was inspiring, charming, daunting—a universe unto himself. His death, while I was at work on this book, sent me into a surprisingly more complicated mourning than I would have imagined, since I did not really know him, nor he me, had never had a personal conversation with him, and hadn’t laid eyes on him in more than thirty years. And yet the man left a mark on me. Bloom is actually one of the reasons I became an actor. It was in his seminar in about 1985 or 1986 that I decided I was outclassed in this academic field and, already twenty-five years old, started casting about nervously for other things to do with my life. (Oh, it’s a good story—sad, funny, and absurd—the punchline is: “A world without adjectives.” I know, I know—that’s not enough, but there are other names involved, big names, so I only tell it to friends. Close friends. That’s a story for another time. The memoirs, perhaps. The memoirs I’ll never write.)
Fast-forward. It must have been the year 2000. I hadn’t been in New Haven for probably fifteen years. Living in LA, I was writing an episode of The X-Files to direct that would eventually be filmed as “Hollywood A.D.” For the plot, or crime, or caper, or gag, or “X-File,” I had conceived of a character loosely inspired by a case I’d read about—Mark Hofmann, a Mormon and forger, and eventual bomber and convicted murderer. I was taken by the fact that Hofmann, when forging extremel
y sensitive and valuable religious documents as Joseph Smith in Smith’s hand, seemed to believe that he, in very real essence, became Joseph Smith—actually, and therefore in some deep sense, his forgeries were not forgeries, but more like channeling, or ongoing revelation, a return to authenticity. He thought and wrote like an actor who has completely lost himself in the character. He became his role. I was in the midst of the worldwide phenomenon of the show and its demands upon me and its claims upon my very identity. For millions of people all over the globe, I was not David Duchovny; I was Mulder. The X-Files were real, right? The government was hiding the truth. Mulder was real to people. More real than me. But I knew that was a lie. Wasn’t it?
I was very interested to develop this line between the possession by a character, acting, and truth, and I tried to portray it through a kind of whimsical lens using the frame and characters of the show I was doing at the time. Thanks to Chris Carter for giving me the reins to hijack his great show to work out my existential problems with fame and identity for a week. I offered Oliver Stone the lead guest-starring role (’60s radical turned religious fundamentalist), and he seemed into it, but after some spirited discussions, we couldn’t make the dates work. The actor and poet Paul Lieber auditioned, got the role, and did a super, wonderfully off-kilter job. I did get to have my great friend Garry Shandling play me—I mean play Mulder—in the movie being made about the forgery/murder case within the TV show that constitutes the shifting frame and questioning of narrative and actual, historical truth. In 2020, these still seem like good questions to be asking.
Anyway. In the course of researching Mark Hofmann in 2000 (I called the character in the show Micah Hoffman—so many breadcrumbs, so many fingerprints at the scene—I wanted to be known, you see, to be found out, and my Hoffman was a forger of Jesus Christ, not Joseph Smith—go big or go home, right?), I came upon Bloom’s 1992 work, The American Religion, in which he professes something more than mere admiration for Joseph Smith. He saw genius in him. Say what? Now, I had no feelings either way or natural interest in Mormonism. I came to it merely through my voracious ambition to hang a story, to use the singular, fascinating, human tragedy of Mark Hofmann as a way to discuss/meditate upon forgery, fakery, authenticity, acting, crime, and charisma while hanging out with my buddy Garry on a Fox network TV show. Like most Americans, I simply knew the Mormon broad outlines—very straight, very white, no coffee or alcohol, no premarital intercourse, and polygamy. The “prophet” Joseph Smith on the run, murdered young. I knew Danny Ainge of the Boston Celtics and Steve Young of the San Francisco 49ers were Mormon. That was the extent of my knowledge on the subject.
But I found in Bloom’s brooding upon Joseph Smith all the things that my character Bronson Powers finds when he converts by chance and necessity to Mormonism. The organization and otherness Bloom sees in Mormons, their abstract true Americanness. More than anything, it was this sense of latter-day vitality rather than end-time entropy that I found freeing and right, story-worthy. As a devout man of literature, before becoming an actor, I had felt the crushing weight of the past and its genius, what Bloom himself would call the “anxiety of influence” in his best-known work. How to escape that weight, the past? One way is to forget, or not know it, to not read, to become incurious, and to call anything but self-interest fake. I don’t see that working out well today. People of good conscience look on in horror at the power of daily self-reinvention in politics and on Instagram. Is that what it is to be American? Is Gatsby Everyman? Were we heading there all along? I see the intoxicating freedom, but it’s a freedom from, not of, truth.
How to honor and escape the genius of the past? Those are the binding questions. Those are bonds. Those are questions only a big soul like Smith or Bloom would grapple deeply with, and hopefully, Bronson Powers’s wrestling with that adversarial angel would also merit attention, shed light, and give pleasure. How to feel primary when you’ve come so late upon the scene? All these vectors were in play with Bloom and Smith, and America itself.
So I took what I needed at the time in the year 2000 to write my X-File, and I moved on. But the seeds were planted, the interest accumulating. Eventually, I came upon Richard Bushman’s excellent 2005 biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling. Clearly, I was not done with the subject. Another story I’d been contemplating as a novel or movie was about a disaffected, drug-dealing high school kid who undergoes a sexual and political awakening in the course of organizing a fast-food franchise union drive (I refer you to Magnus Isacsson’s 2002 documentary, Maxime, McDuff & McDo). I was calling that story “Uncle Samburger,” and it got stripped down, transformed, and folded, as Deuce’s BurgerTown war, into the larger frame of the Powers family saga. The whole enterprise started to grow, take on a shape and life of its own. Add to this my ongoing interest in climate change and the vanishing health and beauty of natural worlds such as Joshua Tree, and the abject obscenity of the Trump administration—I name-check some of them in the book; their names should not be forgotten. Price, Zinke, Mnuchin, Pence—say their names, do not forget—villains all. Real villains, unlike the paper tigers they rail against, whose crimes will not be fully rendered and appraised for years. And here we are in 2021, and here is Truly Like Lightning.
Patience. I also want to acknowledge an earlier teacher at Princeton, Maria DiBattista, who, while weighing me down with the greats—Woolf, Beckett—did not impart to me the inescapable belatedness and fatalism of a Bloom. She conjured more of a sense of a reciprocal love for literature, a positive, mutually nurturing vision more than a patriarchal struggle, a gloss on the unrequited or at least dangerously lopsided love affair I saw in Bloom. I guess I’m a bit of both. They are my literary/critical parents.
Heartfelt thanks to Jonathan Galassi, who had me pitch a few ideas to him for a next book, lit up at this one, and said, “I’d like to see you do that.” And then he kept at me and made me see it through before I got distracted by other work, lost energy, then hope, and abandoned it. Ideas are so fragile when they begin, their immune systems so underdeveloped, anything can kill them before they bloom. Jonathan is a wise and gentle gardener. And he knows how to prune. His editorial hand was sure and inspiring again this time around. I don’t think I’d have written one novel, let alone four, had we not begun to work together.
And big ups to my agent, Andrew Blauner, who, when I told him that Jonathan liked this new (old/new) idea, said, “Let’s get a contract.”
I said, “No, then I’ll be legally impelled to write it.”
And he said, “Haha, exactly.”
He knows me.
Thanks to my friend the great actor Ron Eldard, who put up with my many no doubt silly questions about Mormonism during our long-ago countless meals at A Votre Santé on San Vicente.
Thanks to Emlyn Cameron for his detailed research and wandering down roads I didn’t have the patience to get lost on, and to Christian Kerr, who began casting the wide net of research for me in 2018.
Also thanks to my early readers—Monique Pendleberry, Carrie Malcolm, Matt Warshaw, Chris Carter, Amy Koppelman, Janey L. Bergam, John McNamara, and Brad Davidson.
ALSO BY DAVID DUCHOVNY
Holy Cow
Bucky F*cking Dent
Miss Subways
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Duchovny is a television, stage, and screen actor, as well as a singer-songwriter, screenwriter, director, and novelist. He lives in New York and Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PART I JOSHUA TREE
PART II FAST TIMES AT RANCHO CUCAMONGA HIGH
PART III BLOOD ATONEMENT
AN EXALTED MAN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY DAVID DUCHOVNY
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2021 by David Duchovny
All rights reserved
First edition, 2021
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lines from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” words and music by Doug Ingle. Copyright © 1968 (renewed) Cotillion Music, Inc., Ten East Music, and Iron Butterfly Music. All rights administered by Cotillion Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.
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* Joseph Smith to the Church, September 7, 1842, in PJS, 2:473‒74.
* Joseph Smith to All the Saints, September 1, 1842, in PWJS 571.
* 2 Samuel 11:26–27.
* Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man. (Psalm 43:1)
* Brigham Young, delivered in the Bowery, Great Salt Lake City, September 21, 1856.
* Karl Rove as quoted in an interview with Ron Suskind.