The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

“So Satan and Noah,” Dixie plowed stubbornly along, “slaughtered all these poor stupid animals. And their blood fertilized the grapes. And that's why, after the first drink, one is as mild as a sheep, and after the second, one is courageous like a lion. After the third, one is stupid like an ape.”

  “One certainly is,” said Chantra, who'd been keeping count.

  “And after the fourth,” Dixie said, glaring at her, “one wallows in mud, like a hog.”

  There was a silence that embraced the entire room. “That's the punch line?” I said.

  “I don't know how to explain this to someone whose idea of a theological authority is Don Rickles,” Dixie said loftily, “but this is a sermon, not a joke.”

  “And I don't know how to explain this to a dinner guest,” I said, “but most people in a small, convivial social gathering would prefer a joke to a sermon.”

  “California is so trivial,” Dixie said.

  “Boy,” I said, “I bet their tongues would be hanging out in New York.”

  “Anyway, look what happened to poor Noah,” Chantra said, coming to her ex-husband's rescue. “His own kid came in while Noah was sleeping it off and cut the poor old sot's balls off, or whatever he did.”

  “The most mysterious hundred and fifty words in the Bible.” Dixie was warming up again.

  Chantra emitted a ladylike groan. “I've made a mistaaaake” she wailed.

  “So crime doesn't pay,” said Eleanor, trying to put a conversational cap on it.

  “I wouldn't go that far,” Dixie said, taking a tremendous gulp from his bottle. “Look at the first murderer.”

  ”A Bible class,” Chantra said to the air. “Fifty-one years old and he has to take a Bible class.”

  “Fifty,” Dixie said. “Fifty-one next week.”

  “What did happen to the first murderer?” I was interested in spite of myself.

  “Say the magic word, win a hundred dollars,” Eleanor said resignedly. She'd bandaged my head the evening before and she'd had enough of murderers for one week.

  “Cain,” Dixie said triumphantly. “Clobbered his insufferable schmuck of a brother in a field. Why? Because Abel's sacrifices—there we go again with the blood and guts—were accepted, and Cain's weren't.”

  I ran my personal mosaic of the Old Testament through my head and discovered that some pieces were missing. “Are you saying Cain got off?”

  “Got off?” Dixie said. “He got the biblical version of overcharging on his Visa and having his credit extended infinitely. Cain was a dirt farmer. Abel was a shepherd, the earliest record of the kind of rivalry that was the basis of every western John Wayne ever made. The shepherd's sacrifices pleased God and the farmer's didn't.”

  “God's not a vegetarian?” Eleanor said. “Harold would hate this conversation.” Harold was her rapidly balding publisher.

  “Tofu hadn't been invented,” I said. One of the things that most deeply divided Eleanor and me was tofu. “Anyway, why would anybody think God was a vegetarian? Look how many millions of years he spent jury-rigging evolution so it could produce incisors.”

  “Somehow,” Dixie said, “I don't think the smoke from burning tofu would have brought Jehovah lickety-split to Cain's campfire. Anyway, who knows? Maybe Cain invented it. Never underestimate a Jew who needs a moment of God's time.”

  “Intriguing speculation aside,” I said, “Cain got a slap on the wrist.”

  “A parking ticket in Beverly Hills would have given him a harder time, and this was his own brother that he killed. The Septuagint, the Greek Bible, which is more faithful to the original than the one King James cooked up, even suggests that Cain set Abel up, invited him to drop by some godforsaken field, you should pardon the expression, before he brained him. In a modern court of law we'd call that premeditation.”

  ”A parking ticket in Beverly Hills,” Eleanor said. “That's serious.”

  “So what was his punishment?” Dixie said rhetorically. “God told Cain he couldn't farm anymore, a blessing in disguise if there ever was one. No more scratching in the dirt to raise vegetables that he couldn't even sacrifice, much less gain a little weight on. So Cain threw away his hoe and cleaned up his boots or whatever they wore in those days, and founded a city, probably the first city in fact, a thriving little metropolis called Enoch. And he found a wife somewhere, we won't go into that, and had lots of kids and made it into the social register as one of Enoch's most important citizens, a regular pillar of society. Some punishment.”

  “What about the mark of Cain?” Eleanor said.

  “On the whole,” Dixie said complacently, “I'd prefer it to the mark of Abel. A big F, for fertilizer or N for nitrogen, if you prefer.”

  I thought about Sally Oldfield. “Crime pays,” I said.

  “You weren't on the job,” Dixie said to mollify me.

  Eleanor sniffed twice and got up fast. “Oh, hell,” she said, “something's burning.” She hurried toward the kitchen.

  “Let's hope it's the vegetables,” Chantra said. “Otherwise you may have to set a place for Jehovah.”

  Over dinner, which we ate at a rickety card table that usually held the used Macintosh computer on which Eleanor did her writing, the conversation turned to the bandage on my head.

  “I got in front of the wrong person,” I said.

  “If I'd known you were hurt, we would have canceled,” Chantra said. Dixie, his fund of biblical insights exhausted for the moment, was chewing. Eleanor was banging pots together in the kitchen and casting resentful glances at me because I wasn't helping. “Simeon,” Chantra continued, using a line that Eleanor could have written for her, “are you sure you're in the right line of work?”

  “If I weren't an investigator, I wouldn't have met you,” I said with shopworn gallantry.

  “We were suspects,” Dixie said reprovingly around a mouthful of potato. He had gravy on his wrists. Chantra, on the other hand, used her napkin more often than she used her fork.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat,” I said. “Sure, you were suspects. Everybody was a suspect in that one.”

  “No one in this room is sorrier about your head than I am,” Eleanor said, putting an unrecognizable dessert on the table more loudly than was strictly necessary. “But I haven't done this much work alone since I was made blackboard monitor. And that was in fifth grade.”

  “I'll bet you were an angel in fifth grade,” I said. “If there are Chinese angels.”

  “Why wouldn't there be? What do you think, there's a color line at St. Peter's gate?”

  “Please,” I said. “You'll get Dixie started again.”

  “Wrong Testament,” Dixie said. “If I want fairy tales I'll go to the Brothers Grimm.” He inserted a fork experimentally into the dessert. “What is this?” he said.

  “Pureed apples and cranberries,” Eleanor said defiantly, “with crème fraîche, cinnamon, and raisins. Made without sugar or flour. Flour clogs the small intestine.”

  Dixie lost interest visibly. “Potatoes were great,” he said.

  “Lop sop,” I said.

  “Simeon,” Eleanor said. “I speak Cantonese.”

  “You taught it to me.”

  “This is not junk.”

  “It's great,” Chantra said with her mouth full. “I want the recipe.”

  “Nothing would have made me cancel tonight,” I said to Chantra. “I need some information on things of the spirit.” Things of the Spirit was the name of Chantra's store on Hollywood Boulevard, an emporium of New Age panaceas ranging from cabalistic texts and crystals to aromatherapy.

  “The hidden agenda emerges,” Dixie said, tasting the dessert. “Apple pie,” he said, looking surprised.

  “Information about what things?” Chantra asked.

  “One thing, really. The Church of the Eternal Moment.”

  The silence that followed was punctuated only by the scraping of Dixie's fork. Like most skinny people, he could eat for hours. Eleanor sat down.

  “Have I said something wrong
?” I said.

  “I know something about the Church of the Eternal Moment,” Chantra said carefully. “Little girls and voices from beyond.”

  “See?” I said. “Ask an expert.”

  “It's not something I'd steer my customers to. People in my kind of business have to be careful to keep a distance from the frauds.” Eleanor made a wordless noise of assent.

  “I'm glad to hear it,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”

  Chantra chewed the requisite twelve bites and I waited to see if her creativity was on the rise. “There are a lot of members,” she finally said. “More than you'd think. Not just in L.A., but in Denver and Seattle and Chicago and New York. Anywhere, I'd guess, where there are large numbers of spiritually lost people with more money than sense.”

  “Some of it seems to make sense,” I said, thinking about Skippy Miller and the Revealing.

  “Sure it does. If it didn't, the people wouldn't keep forking over the money. I'm talking about priorities, not content. The content helps people, up to a point, at least. The priority, it seems to me, is keeping the cash flowing. If people get helped, fine; if they don't, well, keep the cash flowing anyway.”

  “And the cash does flow?” That was Eleanor, her chin on her hand. She never ate dessert, even when she'd made it. Her black blunt-cut hair framed the high bones of her face.

  “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

  “Are 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?”