There were many things I could have said just then. But I just said “Right,” and looked bashful.
He wrote me a ticket for $70. A whole day’s wages. Not to mention the number of nations into which humankind was scattered after the Tower of Babel, the “threescore and ten years” limit of the Biblical human lifespan, the number of Israelites who entered into the land of bondage in Deuteronomy 10:22, the number of years of God’s wrath in Zechariah 1:12, the year in which the Second Temple was destroyed, and the number of years that copyright law grants a creator exclusive rights to their work. A bitter, hopeless number. Then he warned me that the penalty would be higher if I was caught again. Warned me that he and his were watching me now, that maybe I had been living like this for a long time, but that wasn’t going to fly anymore. Then he gave me some sort of pat on the shoulder which I think was supposed to be manly, maybe even paternal, and sent me back to work.
I had missed my break. That was the worst part of all of it. I’d been humiliated, I’d lost seventy dollars, and I’d missed my break. I needed to vent. I lay back in my chair, closed my eyes, and concentrated as hard as I could:
[Narwhals of Jericho]
No answer. Figured. I was too wired up to telepathy straight.
So I reset the timer. One more shift. One more hour before I could go home. The computer fed me my next Name candidate. I spoke.
“VIS-LAIGA-RON-TEPHENOR-AST-AST-TELISSA-ROC-SUPH-VOD-APANOR-HOV-KEREG-RAI-SI.”
I hated to admit it, but the lost money really hurt. Ever since I lost my scholarship I’d been treading water, trying to avoid starving to death until I could claw my way back into the intellectual world. For six months I’d been telling myself that the job at Countenance was a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Maybe I could impress people here and move up from production floor drone to scientific advisor, become one of the guys who finds patterns in the Divine Names and helps narrow the search space.
I could have done it. I’d already made discoveries in the field – small ones, but bigger than some made by theorists with good reputations and nice offices. But I had to get my foot back in the door. I was saving a couple hundred bucks a month. With enough time, I could get enough money to supplement loans, maybe find myself another scholarship somewhere else, even a community college would be better than this, make something of myself. And now all that was seventy dollars further away. A minor setback, but still somehow infuriating. Maybe something that put me in the wrong frame of mind, changed how I interpreted what was to come.
“COR-ASTA-NAMI-NAMI-TELTHE-SO-KATA-RU.”
The minutes on the timer ticked down. The words on the computer kept coming. My energy slowly seeped away. The domino whose fall would precipitate the End of Days teetered.
There were forty seconds on the timer when the computer gave me a monster. It started ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON-MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA-KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER-GALISDO-TAHUN… and it just kept going. Fifty two letters. Two longer than the Wrathful Name. It was the longest Name I’d ever been given to test, by far. I was shocked Countenance would even bother.
I incanted: “ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON-MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA-KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER-GALISDO-TAHUN…” until I reached the end of the word. It was not a Name of God.
I incanted: “ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON-MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA-KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER-GALISDO-TAHUN…” until I reached the end of the next one. It wasn’t a Name of God either.
I incanted: “ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON-MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA-KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER-GALISDO-TAHUN…” and just as I finished, my timer reached zero and told me I was finished, for today, free until tomorrow morning crashed down on me and I started the same thing all over again.
“Meh,” I said. “Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh.”
That was the part that led to the apocalypse.
I was struck by a wave of holy light. The heavens opened and poured into me. My soul rang like a bell.
Four hundred years earlier, an old man in Prague had explained to his students that yes, you could make a golem, you could bestow upon it the nefesh, the animal soul. With sufficient enlightenment, you could even bestow upon it the ruach, the moral soul. But the neshamah, the divine spark, you could not bestow upon it, for that was a greater work, and would require a greater Name than any ever discovered.
Six thousand years earlier, the wind of God had moved upon the bare red dirt of Eden and shaped clay into the figure of a man. It stood there for a moment, a crude statue, and then a voice from Heaven spoke a Name, and the clay came to life, lumbered into a standing position. It spoke a second Name, and the clay’s eyes opened, and within them were innocence and curiosity and the capacity to wonder and learn. And it spoke a third Name, and it was as if a light went on inside of it, and the dust became aware that it was dust and in so doing was dust no longer.
And that third Name was fifty-eight letters long.
It began: ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON-MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA-KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER-GALISDO-TAHUN…
And it ended: …MEH-MEH-MEH-MEH-MEH-MEH.
All this I saw, as in a dream or vision. Six months and five hundred thousand nonsense words of pointless suffering, suddenly redeemed. The possibilities swam in front of me, began to take form. This wasn’t just a Name. This was the royal road. And it was mine. It was none of the candidates my computer had fed me; it was six syllables longer than any of them, Countenance would never find it. As I walked out of the office and headed for the CalTrain station, I tried to calm myself, give my mind the stillness it needed for telepathy to work. Finally, I sent out a feeler.
[Baleen shem tov] I said.
A feeling, something more than nothing. Somebody was there.
[Anger] said an internal voice that was not quite my own, although the telepathic link radiated only love. Then, [Moabite Dick]
[I hate you] I thought back, but I sent through a burst of fondness. Ana and I had a running contest to come up with the worst Biblical whale pun. She always won.
[Ana. Something amazing just happened. You know our bets?]
[Yes,] the other voice said.
[I bet you I can become emperor of the world within a month. If I win, you have to give me a kiss.]
A feeling of surprise, not my own. Then suspicion. [And what do I get if you can’t?]
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. [Um. I’ll buy you dinner.]
A pause. [No. You’re too stingy. You wouldn’t promise to buy dinner unless you were sure you could win. So what’s going on? Fess up!]
[I’ll be home in a few minutes. I’ll show you!]
[You know we have choir tonight?]
[I forgot about that. I’ll show you afterwards, then.]
[Tabarnacle,] said Ana.
[I will hate you forever,] I thought cheerfully, then stepped onto the CalTrain. The bustle of finding my seat broke the connection, which was just as well.
We would start tonight. By the end of the week, we would have results. By the end of the month, the whole world would have changed. It was so clear to me. It was spread out before me, like Moses’ vision of the Promised Land.
“Palo Alto!” announced the train’s loudspeaker. “Palo Alto!”
Palo Alto is Spanish for “tall tree”. The phrase “tall tree” appears in the Bible, in Daniel 4:10. King Nebuchadnezzer has a dream, and it goes like this:
“I saw a tall tree out in a field, growing higher and higher into the sky until it could be seen by everyone in all the world. Then as I lay there dreaming, I saw one of God’s angels coming down from heaven. And he shouted, ‘Cut down the tree; lop off its branches; shake off its leaves, and scatter its fruit…For this has been decreed, so that all the world may understand that the Most High dominates the kingdoms of the world and gives them to anyone he wants to, even the lowliest of men!’”
“Palo Alto!” announced the loudspeaker again. “Doors will be closing shortly. Palo Alto!”
This was not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Interlude א: Th
e Cracks In The Sky
March 14, 1969
Washington, DC
Richard Nixon was confused and upset.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t expected problems. He’d only been on the job six weeks, but he knew a president had to be ready for anything. But “anything” was supposed to mean economic downturns, or crime waves, or The Russians.
Instead Apollo 8 had crashed into some kind of weird space glass, the sky was cracking open, the clouds were forming ominous patterns, and Tuesdays had stopped happening.
The Tuesdays were the most worrying part. For the past three weeks, people all over the world had gone to sleep on Monday and woken up Wednesday. Everything had been in order. The factories had kept running. Lawns had been mowed. Some basic office work had even gotten done. But of the preceding twenty-four hours, no one had any memories.
Today was a Friday, and it had happened three times. The President had gone to sleep Friday night, and woken up Friday morning to a call from the Chief of Staff telling him that everyone was very upset because it was Friday morning again and how was this happening? Everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours had unhappened, been rolled back somehow. Or maybe everyone’s Saturday-morning consciousness had been shot back into their Friday-morning bodies. He had no idea, and the American people were starting to demand answers.
He’d called the head of the CIA and asked him to get whatever department full of eggheads had covered up Roswell as a weather balloon, tell them to concoct some plausible story for whatever chronological tomfoolery was going on now.
The head of the CIA had just stood there, unflappable. “Mr. President, Roswell was a weather balloon. There was no cover-up. Our organization has no department dedicated to covering up inexplicable events.”
“I’m the [expletive deleted] President, Helms!” Nixon had shouted. “You don’t have to lie to me! Get me your cover-up eggheads immediately!”
“I’m sorry Mr. President,” he said coolly, “there’s no such agency.”
“[expletive deleted] [expletive deleted]”, Nixon had answered. “Get the [expletive deleted] out of here!”
Then he’d gone to NASA, the Department of Defense, and even the [expletive deleted] National Bureau of Standards, which was apparently in charge of timekeeping and which he hadn’t even known [expletive deleted] existed until today. The today before today. Yestertoday. [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted]. None of them had been any more help than the [expletive deleted] CIA.
It was those cracks in the sky. He was sure of it. Apollo 8 had hit something important. The eggheads at NASA had posited some kind of “nebulous envelope” surrounding the orbit of the moon, made of “compressed dust and gas”. Apollo 8’s collision had caused it to “oscillate”, creating the pattern of glowing, growing spiderweb cracks visible to anybody who looked up into the night sky.
Richard Nixon didn’t believe it, and neither, he figured, did anyone else. If only he could find those people who had covered up Roswell. They would know what to do.
For the past three todays, at 7:38 PM sharp, a red phone on his desk had started ringing. This was worrying for two reasons.
First, the red phone was the symbol of the nuclear hotline between the US and Russia, the last-ditch line of communication to prevent a nuclear war.
Second, the red phone was the symbol of the nuclear hotline. It was a prop he kept on his desk to show reporters. The actual nuclear hotline connected to a large and foreboding machine at the Pentagon that didn’t look nearly as good in pictures. The red phone on his desk wasn’t connected to a phone line and, as far as he knew, didn’t even have a ringer in it.
The first today it started ringing, he’d stared at it for like three minutes before he finally, dumbly, picked it up. The voice on the other end was saying something he couldn’t understand. It occurred to him that the people who monitored the actual nuclear hotline probably spoke Russian.
The second today, he’d been suspicious that it would ring again at the same time, so he’d called an interpreter to the Oval Office. At 7:38 PM, the interpreter had picked it up. “Allo,” the interpreter had said, then started looking more and more puzzled. “This isn’t Russian,” he had said. Then, “This isn’t related to any language I know.” Then, “I don’t think this is a real language.” A few hours later he’d sent over an analysis from the State Department, which concluded that the “language” consisted of the names of the capitals of various 16th-century European countries, arranged in seemingly random combinations.
Today today, Nixon hadn’t bothered. He just sat in the Oval Office doing work. He had been meeting with a man from the Weather Bureau, who wanted to tell him that the clouds were forming ominous patterns. Nixon hadn’t bought it. “I’m the [expletive deleted] President of the United States,” he had told the man, “Do you want me to [expletive deleted] tell you if it’s a cold front or a warm front?”
The man had clarified that he meant really ominous patterns. Like, some big thunderstorms in the Rockies were starting to develop high anvil-like peaks – which was within normal variability for this time of year – but also starting to develop domes and minarets and flying buttresses – which weren’t. And although the Doppler radar didn’t have good enough resolution to be sure, some of the buttresses were starting to look like they might have gargoyles on them.
And before Nixon could say anything, the man had added that a Category 5 hurricane was forming in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was only March, and this literally never happened before July, and something was really wrong here…
It was then, at 7:38 PM, that the red phone started ringing. He considered not picking it up, but at least it would be differently confusing.
To his surprise, the voice on the other end now spoke perfect English.
“HELLO PRESIDENT NIXON. THIS IS THE ARCHANGEL URIEL. I APOLOGIZE FOR RECENT DISRUPTIONS. THE MACHINERY OF THE UNIVERSE HAS BEEN SEVERELY DAMAGED. I AM WORKING TO CONTAIN THE EFFECTS, BUT AT THIS POINT MY POWER IS LIMITED BECAUSE I AM STILL MOSTLY METAPHORICAL. PLEASE INFORM EVERYONE THAT I REGRET THE INCONVENIENCE. AS COMPENSATION FOR YOUR TROUBLE, I HAVE GIVEN EVERY HUMAN THE ABILITY TO PLAY THE PIANO.”
“Wait just a moment here,” said Nixon. “Wait just an [expletive deleted] moment!”
No response.
The head of the Weather Bureau stared at the president shouting into a toy red telephone used as a prop for reporters and visibly unconnected to any phone line.
“Excuse me just a minute,” said the president.
“Of course,” said the bureaucrat.
President Nixon stepped out of the Oval Office and walked downstairs. He went down the corridor connecting the West Wing to the White House proper and entered the East Room, where Franklin Roosevelt’s great Steinway piano stood on the hardwood floor.
He sat down on the piano bench and performed a flawless rendition of Bach’s Concerto I in D Minor.
“[expletive deleted],” said the president.
Chapter 2: Arise To Spiritual Strife
Jerusalem is builded as a city that is in the public domain.
— kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com
May 10, 2017
San Jose
Right down the road from Berryessa Station there’s a big house with a hidden basement. The people who live there – usually six to eight of us, rarely the same from one month to the next – are the sort of artsy college students and aimless twenty-somethings who think that houses should have names. We call it Ithaca. Six days out of the week it’s an ordinary group house, with the ordinary arguments about who has to cook and when the living room is going to get cleaned. But on Wednesday nights people from all over the Bay Area gather in the basement to hold the secret rites of a faith banned throughout the civilized world.
I took out my key and walked inside. I wasn’t alone. The celebrants looked a lot like the rest of Silicon Valley – mostly male twenty or thirty-somethings in jeans and hoodies, shuffling in awkwardly, grumbling ab
out traffic. Their banality wasn’t quite an act, but call it a facade. These were dangerous men. The enforcers of the Shrouded Constitution have cracked the mobs, cracked the cartels, but these men of the ratty t-shirts and faded jeans they have not cracked. A resistance that has never been broken. A cabal that spans centuries and crosses continents. Fanatical, implacable, deadly.
They were the Unitarian Universalist Church.
The cracks in the sky, the death of Reverend Stevens, the Shrouded Constitution; all of these had rent what was once a more innocent faith and driven it underground, forced it to change tactics. These were the new breed of Unitarians. A host of singers, cantors, open-sorcerors, Marxist-Lurianists, rebels, seekers, counterculture types. All the sundry outcasts Ginsberg had called “angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Never mind that the ancient heavenly connection had since been definitively located in a giant hurricane three hundred miles off the coast of Louisiana, or that by this point the machinery of night was pretty much held together with duct tape and bubble gum. They burned still.
One of them stood by the makeshift podium. Her hair was in something that made mohawks look conservative, and although you couldn’t see it now she had the flaming chalice symbol of Unitarianism tattooed on her shoulder. She was Erica Lowry, our fearless leader, and editor of the Stevensite Standard alternative newspaper. Also the leaseholder for our group home. Also Ana’s cousin. She was chatting with a guy in a leather jacket, but she lit up when she saw me.
“Aaron!” she said. “I was worried you wouldn’t make it!”
“Stuff happened at work today,” I said, which was a candidate for Understatement Of The Century. “Also, the CalTrain was delayed in Palo Alto for like ten minutes, for kabbalistic reasons.”
Unsong Page 2