by Rick Moody
What was it they wanted? Eduardo asked rhetorically on the second day. Naturally, they had many answers to this question. What they wanted was the rescue of this continent from its oppressors. They wanted relief from the oppressors who had wrongly seized the American lands and visited upon the natives a genocide, who had all but wiped out the mighty bison, who had sown among the native peoples such foul illnesses as smallpox and alcoholism. When they had completed this mission, they would move on to other continents, in the following order: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America.
What were their origins? Their origins—and here Eduardo hoped that Tyrone, as newly installed Minister of Information, would soon come up with a better recitation of the facts—were in the environmental movement. They had originally been an autonomous cell in a decentralized organization with no leader, which had no revolutionary position and whose goal was felonious attacks on property. It should be noted that the Retrievalists still supported the cellular structure of this environmental organization, they just needed to enlarge the political debate to include other legitimate modes of instruction and resistance, such as prisoner exchange, propaganda, black-market financing, counterfeiting, cyberterrorism, et cetera.
“We are aware of certain problems of a legal nature in your own situation,” Eduardo remarked on Saturday, in the middle of the indoctrination, “and we want you to know that we applaud your dramatic efforts in the city of New York.”
“If you’re asking about the, uh, the Asian woman,” Tyrone said, “I had nothing to do with that. She’s my friend.”
“We understand that it is important to keep the story streamlined and in a condition where it can be repeated without mistake. We applaud the rigor of your preparations.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it, sir. I got enough problems.”
“For the time being, you are in the care of our organization, and we would like to present you with some intelligence on the strength and militancy of our efforts, so that you may indeed become our Minister of Information.”
It was like graduate school all over again, that was the truth of it. In graduate school there was always the solemnity and the forced language. Eduardo had a trait in common with the graduate students of Tyrone’s acquaintance, and that trait was facial masking. Schizophrenics used the technique, too, especially when speaking to the manifest and latent content of symbolic systems. Tyrone knew this because he’d had the occasional hallucination himself.
After each session would come the catechism. What is our name? Our name is the Retrievalists. What is our origin? Our origin is in the struggle against the pestilence of humanity. When did we begin our struggle? We began our struggle in 1994. What is the nature of our actions? The nature of our actions is random and discontinuous, but we seek the violent destruction of the property of the oppressor. Who is the oppressor? The oppressor is the large multinational corporation and its allies. When will our mission be completed? Our mission will never be completed. How long do we serve? We serve until death.
On Monday, after some more ranting while the kids are at school, there is a period of a couple of hours when Eduardo Alcott has other responsibilities. What could these responsibilities be? Some kind of computer-programming job that he uses to finance both his living situation and his revolutionary cadre, where he might also have access to a server that conceals the Web presence of the Retrievalists. When Eduardo goes out into the poisonous atmosphere of the world, he leaves behind sentries. For Tyrone’s security. Hal, the guy with the unwashed hair, and Nina, the sullen blonde who always seems to wear her sleeves at such a length that as far as Tyrone knows she has no hands. A big lug with a heavy-metal mullet and a Korn tour jersey, named Glenn. Maybe the conversation that ensues is completely scripted. Impossible to know.
“Our parents are perfectly nice and everything, and we were never mistreated by them,” Hal says.
“Yeah,” Nina says. “Our parents are perfectly nice.”
“We came to believe some things, know what I’m saying? We feel like you walk outside, you see certain things, you know, bad things. How can you not walk around and feel like things are getting worse, you know? Once there was some mystery to this life, now there’s none. Now there’s just waking up and taking the standardized test, making sure that you get into a good college, you know? So you can go work for the Bechtel Corporation or the Carlyle Group. And, like, all this pressure about college, what’s that about?”
“Yeah,” Nina says. “College.”
“I know how to clean my room and I know how to pick the lock on the liquor cabinet. That’s about it.”
Glenn, across the room, adds his own perceptions of the revolutionary situation while sharpening knives. “I had to take the door actually off the hinges at my mom’s. She had it all in this closet with a really strong padlock. I just took the door off the hinges.”
“We’re normal kids. We’re not statistics. But we’ve got to this point where we feel like we have to act, get it? And that’s why we’re going to do what we have to do. Because that’s how a revolutionary movement functions, you know, it acts.”
Tyrone takes in the nuances of the scene. The television, with the sound off, is unwatched, as ever, though it happens to be broadcasting, at present, The Werewolves of Fairfield County. A repeated episode he happens to have seen. Time, in this rerun episode, is moving backward rather than forward. Only the werewolves seem to know how to deal with it.
“We’ve been thinking about it, you know, and we have, like, deliberations. We debate,” Nina says. “What should be the first direct action? Like, what will be the thing that gets us the right kind of attention so that we can continue to attract other soldiers, or whatever, and to promote what we believe in?”
Gradually, as though a curtain is being retracted by an offstage dwarf, the plan under discussion emerges. The plan, like many such plans, involves the element of fire, which in Tyrone’s fevered and heavily sequestered imagination is the most ominous of elements. The plan has been dreamed up by a committee of teenagers, and the plan involves a firebomb, homemade, which shall be used on a local chain business, which does not belong in such an estimable place, a place of nature and wildness, namely Concord, Massachusetts.
“Like, what makes those people think they can just bring a franchise like that into a town like this?” Hal asks. “What makes them think they can do that? Don’t the people who live here have any say in these kinds of things? They don’t have any say because these things are all being figured out someplace else by real-estate assholes and —”
“By some idiot,” Glenn says, grinding another knife.
“By some guy who probably has kids that he needs to put through school somehow, and how is he going to put his kid through school, and he can’t figure out any way he’s going to do it because he shouldn’t have gotten his wife pregnant in the first place, they should have used some kind of birth control, or they couldn’t get an abortion because of where they live, or whatever, so he has no choice but to get a job at this lousy place, and then it’s up the chain or get fired by the big corporation, and so now he works his way up, like, until he’s got the job that is oppressing other people every day, and that’s the job of figuring out where the franchises go.”
“I don’t even like doughnuts,” Nina says. “I mean, I maybe liked doughnuts when I was a kid, but now I think doughnuts are eaten by people who don’t know any better. Like, the whole idea of the doughnut is to dumb you down. People, they eat the doughnuts and they can’t think straight, and they have to take a nap, you know, and then they can’t understand the forces that are working against them, like, they don’t even know whether a doughnut is nutritious or anything, because how are you going to find out? The doughnut is a symbol of how people don’t have any power, and so the doughnut has to go.”
“We tried thinking up some revolutionary slogans for a protest,” Hal says. “You know, like, WE CALL IT DOUGHNOT!”
The three kids lau
gh, and their laughter is open and inviting, as if it comes from a more innocent place. Tyrone hears fervor, and hears youth, and hears how lovely and frail youth is, how open to the bad ideas in any room, so easily sent on long, erroneous rambles, and these things can coexist, the frailty and openness of youth, the mercilessness of it, and that’s how you get a pair of Cambodian twelve-year-olds who smoke opium to persuade an army of adults that God speaks through them.
“So you’re going to firebomb a Krispy Kreme?” he asks.
“Reduce it to cinders,” Hal says.
“Leaving a black, smoky pile of nothing,” Nina says.
“And when is this meant to happen?” Tyrone asks.
“Can’t tell you that,” Nina says, and she goes and puts her hands on the shoulders of Hal. “Eduardo knows all of the specifics, and we only learn things bit by bit, and that’s because we’re not, you know, so old yet. But we’re in on all the planning and deliberations and stuff.”
“You’re expecting that I’m going to hang around and watch you guys blow up a doughnut restaurant?”
Glenn lines up knives on the counter. “Eduardo says you are a revolutionary.”
“I’m a bike messenger,” Tyrone says, and then says more than he’s said in a long time. “Man, I’ll tell you what I am, I’m a bike messenger. But once I, too, had a lot of ideas about things.” Warming to the subject as he goes, “I had all these ideas that I could change the world, the kinds of ideas that you guys have. I thought I could run for office. I thought I could help the other people who have my color of skin, because I was lucky enough to get a good education, which most of the people with my color of skin don’t have. For no good reason did I get any of this. The dice just fell my way. And I could go back and teach these people how to do better in the world, make more of the world. And the way I thought I was going to do this was first with words, and I went and worked with the words, you know, in graduate school, and when the words wouldn’t bend the way I thought they were going to bend, when I woke up one morning and the sentences all looked like they were going places I never expected them to go, then I gave up trying to do that.”
“That’s exactly what we —”
Tyrone raises his hand, knowing that in this group, if in no other, he can command attention.
“And then I thought that maybe I could change the world by making art, you know, and I started in doing just that. I would take a book and I would mark out all the words except for the few words that represented a secret code, a code assuring that certain systems were in place, big impenetrable systems. I would open these codes for the reader, and I did this obsessively, all night long sometimes. I would do these things, I would do violence to books, and open them up, you know, so that people could see what was really written inside, and when this didn’t change the world, I started, well, I guess I started to get a little desperate, I started making collages, and then videos of collages, mismatched words and books and pictures, all those seductions in the world; I would stay up for nights at a time, and I wouldn’t go out, I’d believe that I had worked out important artistic statements, and when I didn’t make any money at it, as I always thought I would, I got a smaller apartment, still, you know, holding on to this idea that I could change the world, even if I had to economize. And then I got another smaller apartment, always so I could keep the studio where my work was stored, and then I didn’t have enough money for the studio, so I had to get this bike messenger’s job. And that was a blow. At first I said I wouldn’t do it for long, you know, because I had this other important responsibility, but then a couple years went by and I wasn’t young the way I was young anymore, and I was a guy who had this job where I could run free in the city, and eventually these patterns emerged, and I would ride in the city, between all these addresses, all these corporations or agencies or law firms, whatever, and that started to seem like that was the art, that was changing the world in a way. I was making patterns, just like I was trying to write something or draw something; I was going where the addresses told me to go, and I was sort of like the elements, and so I started not going to the studio as much, and the world wasn’t getting changed by me at all. Gradually, it was sort of like the world was a place that had almost no traces of me in it. I was the messenger; I was the person who made it possible for meaning to happen. A word, or a tape recording, or a compact disc with some information on it, these were never meaningful on their own because they didn’t go from one person to another. They were never complete until they were transmitted by me, so I was a thing that was always missing. I was the completion of the circuit, a device for meanings to get made, but in this way I’d stopped meaning anything at all, myself, I was just a guy a split second between when a letter got written and when it got read. I was the time between meanings, a time that grows shorter and shorter the longer you live, until it seems to be going backward, and all of this meant I had not changed the world, and it meant that I had done some good by not changing the world, by deciding to leave it as it was.”
When he finishes his disquisition, there is stupefaction in the crumbling interior of the kitchen, a stupefaction among the revolutionaries. A werewolf bays at something on the television screen across the room.
“But your brother said —”
“Never mind what my brother said.”
“But what about the woman in New York?” Hal asks.
“Why is it a good thing if I hit a woman on the sidewalk with a brick? Which I did not do. Why is that a good thing for me to have done that from your point of view? Did you ever hit anyone in the head? Do you know what head injuries are like?”
Glenn arises from his stool, from his knife sharpening, and he comes to the uncomfortable folding chair where Tyrone sits. “We’re willing to do what needs to be done.”
“You know what’s going to happen if you get convicted of arson?”
“We’re not going to get caught,” Hal says.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, before I leave, which is maybe what I’m going to do here in a second, and that is that I was actually talking to, uh, to Samantha Lee, the woman, the victim, on the phone at the moment that she was hit, the woman, the victim. She was on the phone, and I was talking to her from the studio, at the moment she was —”
He didn’t realize it, until this dusk, in this safe house, somewhere in the suburbs of Massachusetts, the momentousness of what happened. He fled the city of New York because, as a messenger, transit was his skill, because that is what he did. He fled the scene and he prepared for the worst, which is the lot of the black man, and then the worst came to pass, which is also arguably the lot of the black man, followed by further and further examples of the worst. All of this. Yet now it seems that there is a miserly portion of redemption available to him, and this redemption is in the fact that he meant to say something kind to this woman, Samantha Lee, he had called to do so in the first place, to say something kindly to this woman, who believed in what Tyrone had once done, as an artist, and this is what he meant to say, “I am in the studio tonight” because of you, because of you, because of you, but the line went dead, and now, in front of a bunch of teenagers, he feels the unmistakable import of that moment.
And that is when Eduardo returns.
Eduardo turns off the television. Flings house keys onto the kitchen table.
There is silence in the room.
“Tonight is Monday, and this is the night that I’ve set aside for further loyalty tests,” Eduardo begins. “As you know, I’ve designed loyalty tests for each of you, to make sure you’re up to the revolutionary actions ahead. I’ve just returned, in fact, from making sure that our other comrade, Max, who is presently operating as a double agent, is functioning effectively and that his cover has not been compromised in the first phase of the loyalty tests, in which he gave up his own brother to the movement. He seems fine, except for the fact that his mother says he is grounded for the rest of the semester.
“I can also tell the Minister of I
nformation that news of his case has now reached the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His parents are aware of the situation and they have contacted the out-of-state police.
“Now, what we have scheduled tonight is the next phase of the loyalty tests. Revolutionary brothers and sisters, I have to bring the Minister of Information up to speed and so I must revisit ground covered earlier, and my apologies. We speak again of the ancient surgery of trepanation and of the use of the ancient surgery as a treatment for maladies of the mind. I think we have spoken of its use for depressed skull fractures, most of these resulting from battles where slingshots and rock throwing were common, and we have spoken of its use in situations where demon possession was the diagnosis, also with seizure and epilepsy, but have we spoken of its use with respect to migraine? Yes, the ancient surgery was used as a cure for migraine because migraines were considered a kind of demon possession. And what was the result of the ancient surgery, my revolutionary brothers and sisters? The result was increased feelings of well-being and peacefulness, greater alertness, and increased sexual feeling. This is the truth about the ancient surgery, that it has a very modern capacity, and that is for increased feelings of well-being.
“I hesitate to give you the proof, my revolutionary brothers and sisters, because I’m guessing that you just won’t believe it’s as simple as this, but it is, and this is where loyalty comes into it, my brothers. So now if you could just step forward here and feel this part of my skull.”