The Four Last Things

by Timothy Hallinan

  “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 fr
ont 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?”

  “It can prepare us to face the present,” Dr. Wilburforce said. “We're not talking about heaven or hell, purgatory or past lives in this Congregation.” He twiddled his thumbs in a satisfied fashion. “That's part of what I mean about no mumbo-jumbo. One life is one more than most people can deal with. There's a Zen koan with a memorable payoff. You may already know it,” he added charitably. “The supplicant asks his master what he should do to improve his life. ‘Have you had your dinner?’ the master asks. ‘Yes,’ says the supplicant. Then wash the dishes,’ his master says.” Dr. Wilburforce arched his eyebrows meaningfully. “‘Wash the dishes.’ So simple. And yet many people can't even do that. But until you've finished washing the dishes, cleaning up the clutter you've left, you haven't dealt with your immediate past. And until you've dealt with your immediate past, you're no match for your more remote past, your Embedded Past, as we call it.”

  “Your past is your enemy,” I said.

  He unlaced his fingers in order to flop a dismissive hand around. “Dogma,” he said. “Useful dogma, but dogma nonetheless. We've gone beyond that here.”

  “Beyond it to what?” Eleanor said.

  “Oh, dear,” Dr. Wilburforce said a trifle uncomfortably. “That's a very complicated question.” His eyes wandered over the room and paused for a moment, fixed on a point over my head, and I suddenly knew that someone was standing in the corridor behind us, looking in through the partially closed door. I stifled a paranoid urge to turn around. Dr. Wilburforce picked up a large briar pipe and polished its bowl on the side of his nose.

  “Very complicated indeed,” he continued, backing off from his answer, “and I'm not sure it can be compressed to good effect in a short newspaper story. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Without getting into the fine points of doctrine,” Eleanor said, leaning forward, “can you explain the difference between the Congregation and the Church of the Eternal Moment? And, no, we don't.”

  Dr. Wilburforce lit up and blew plumes of bluish smoke through his nostrils. The pipe made a wet bubbling sound as he sucked at it, and his eyes once again flicked toward the door behind me “I could, of course,” he said. “I could. Good heavens, of course I could. Who if not me, eh?” He gave a tense little chuckle, exhaling fumes that smelled of burning cherries. “Well, well. I hope you won't mind if I ask you: what is the general slant of your story?”

  “We've heard rumors,” Eleanor said, repeating word for word the line I'd given her, “of improprieties in the Church of the Eternal Moment.”

  “Improprieties.” Wreathed in his fruity smoke, Dr. Wilburforce tasted the word like a sommelier trapped between a substandard wine and a smart customer. “Spiritual improprieties?” he said cautiously.

  “Financial,” Eleanor said.

  Relaxation seeped through Dr. Wilburforce's outsize frame. His fingers groped toward each other and met again over his stomach like five overweight pairs of illicit lovers on safe ground at last. He actually sighed. “I'm not surprised,” he said gravely around his pipe. “Not at all.”

  “But there is a relationship, isn't there, between your church and theirs?” Eleanor said.

  “We make no secret of the fact. Man is descended, or rather ascended, as science tells us, from the apes. But science doesn't suggest that men are apes. We of the Congregation are ascended from the Church of the Eternal Moment in the same sense that Protestantism is ascended from the Romish church. Although,” he added hastily, “I mean no disrespect to the Church of Rome, should either of you belong to it.”

  Eleanor, a Taoist to her toenails, surmounted the slur with a brave smile that put Wilburforce in her debt. “No offense,” she said, “although I can't speak for Algy.”

  “I'm okay,” I said. “I used to be a choir boy, but it finally cleared up.”

  “The Whore of Babylon,” Dr. Wilburforce said loudly. Eleanor sat up, looking startled. “What is more important, I ask you, souls or profit? Yes, we share some points of doctr
ine with the Church of the Eternal Moment. Yes, we believe in the early Revealings and in the value of Listening. Yes, we believe that man's potential is infinite if he can clear away the clutter of his past. Or hers, of course,” he amended mechanically for Eleanor's benefit. “We, too, concentrate our efforts on solving the problems of this world, this life, rather than wandering aimlessly around in the vast slough of time and space that we call the Cosmos.” He pronounced the word with a pedantic pleasure, as though other people insisted on calling it something else. Satisfied with the sound of it, he drew vehemently on his pipe and coughed, his face turning a pulse-pounding shade of purple. “But do we speculate in real estate?” he said, blinking back tears. “We do not. Do we invest the donations of our faithful in pork-belly futures and other commodities and money-market funds? We do not. Do we go on television and mewl and puke of poverty for hours on end in order to bleed little old ladies of their food stamps? We most certainly do not. Do we put our tax-exempt dollars into an automobile dealership in Downey or a miniature-golf course in Reseda? Most emphatically we do not.”

  “A miniature-golf course?” I said. “Reseda?”

  “Excuse me for asking, Dr. Wilburforce,” Eleanor said pleasantly, “but how much of this is sour grapes?”

  “My dear Miss Chan, what an extraordinary question. Ha, ha, ha,” Wilburforce laughed, pronouncing each syllable separately and precisely, as though he were trying out a phrase in a language he didn't speak. “Sour grapes indeed. No, Hubert Wilburforce is not perfect. He too can succumb to temptation. Until he was cleansed by the process of Listening he grasped as greedily at the plums of the world as the next man. Like everyone else, he wanted a bigger piece of the pie.” Eleanor winced. “Perhaps he's been fortunate that the temptations he's encountered recently have been relatively small ones, unlike those that are now, even now, distorting and perverting the Church of the Eternal Moment.” He bit down hard enough on the stem of his pipe to crack it. Pulling it out quickly, he looked at it in dismay. Outside, the rain began to pour down in a serious fashion.