by Walter Kirn
It began then. His full confession.
30.
[Via courier]
Agent’s Memo: Before I send along his grandiose ramblings, Selkirk asks that I print the following coordinates and pass them along to you, my bosses, for reasons that he insists you’ll understand soon. I’m humoring him because, frankly, he exhausts me.
30N150W
31.
[Via courier]
Agent’s Preface: The following is a record of an interview with Person of Interest “Kent Ormand Selkirk.” In return for agreeing to speak freely and without the presence of legal counsel concerning his background, activities, and plans, Selkirk made four unorthodox requests, all of which I chose to honor.
1. That our conversations be held in a superpremium king suite of the local W Hotel.
2. That he be provided with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection.
3. That he be able, at any time, to summon as a witness to our talks Lt. Col. Geoffrey Lark (Ret.).
4. That his statements to me be collected and preserved under a title of his choosing (which appears a few lines down).
It should also be noted that the subject, despite showing frequent signs of agitation and psychological confusion, had access to neither alcohol nor drugs during the course of his “confession.” Nor did he speak under duress. If at times his statements seem incoherent, this reflects not only his general mental state but also his peculiar ideas and attitudes concerning the nature of human language—specifically, his adherence to a pseudoscience known as General Semantics and his belief in the power of so-called sigils, which he defined to me when we first sat down as “symbols that have wills. Words or images that don’t just stand for something, but are capable of doing something.” Then he offered to make a sigil for me. He printed his name on a sheet of hotel stationery and said, while drawing a star around the K, “Always remember: The map is not the territory.” He folded the piece of paper exactly six times, touched it to his forehead, shut his eyes, fell silent for a moment, and then reached across the space between our chairs and tucked the paper into my vest pocket, where he urged me to keep it throughout our interactions.
I asked him if he was ready yet. He nodded. Then, on the blank screen of the computer positioned between us on a credenza, he typed in the title mentioned above:
A HISTORY OF PARTICKULAR EVENTS PRESAGING THE TIME-UNBINDING OF THE NEW AEON AS DICTATED BY AN ADEPT OF THELEMA AT THE BEHEST OF ANUBIS, HIS GUARDIAN ANGEL
1.
If I told you where I was born, and when, and how much I weighed and what my parents named me, and even who my parents were, that would be hearsay. I can’t vouch for hearsay. I’d rather confine myself to what I know, leaving out what I’ve been told or have inferred. If that frustrates you, I apologize, but I promised you the truth, Rob, nothing else, and there’s not as much truth in this world as you may think. Indeed, there’s hardly any—about which we may reliably speak, that is—and perhaps the main reason that I lured you here (and you were lured here, make no mistake) was to instruct you on this point. To begin with, you told me last night that you’d been “watching” me, but that isn’t really the case, as it turns out. You were monitoring my communications, but my communications are no more “me” than the squeak of my tennis shoes on a hardwood floor is.
Be patient, Rob. You have a lot to learn, just as I did when I dwelled at your level.
A man, any man, is not the calls he makes, the letters he writes, or the e-mails he sends out. A man is what he knows. And the first thing that I knew in this life—knew independently, on my own, without taking someone else’s word for it, as I did when I memorized the fifty states—was the pleasure I found in caressing an old black dachshund that the three people who called themselves my family referred to as Polly. I didn’t call her anything. No need to. If I wanted her on my lap or on my bed, she came without being beckoned, by and large; and when she didn’t come, I didn’t command her to, which only seemed fair, since she never gave me commands. Everyone else I knew gave me orders constantly, which may be the reason that I had no desire to tickle them under their chins or scratch their butts. The arthritic black dachshund was unique, and so were my feelings for her. This I knew. And it’s all that I knew, truly knew, for several years.
But then the two people whose presence in our house seemed to define what I’d learned to call “my family” decided that they were not each other’s family and set to work dividing up their property, including me and the slender, red-haired girl whom, to satisfy custom, I called my sister. We weren’t split physically, but temporally, in terms of weekends and vacation days. The effect would have been the same if we’d been guillotined and our body parts sealed in separate Ziploc bags. The black dachshund, however, could not be thus apportioned, and since neither my mother-woman nor my father-man wished to care for the animal alone, it went someplace. I never found out where. I heard stories—about a “shelter,” about a “ranch,” about an elderly lady across town—but I didn’t know which one to believe or how to go about investigating them.
That’s a problem. The largest problem, really. Though we’re told by the fashionable thinkers that life provides no answers, only questions, the actual situation is just the opposite. The world is awash in answers, it overflows with them, while the questions that generate them are rather few. (To prove this, just enter the following short sentence into any sophisticated search engine—What are the causes of borderline personality disorder?—and press the return key. Answers without end.) In the case of the vanishing black dachshund, all of the answers I got seemed plausible and one of them seemed, quite possibly, correct (my sister’s, “They left it in the Target parking lot”), but none of them addressed the central problem.
If the dog was gone, was the feeling gone as well?
Because I wanted it back, I decided to call the feeling “love” instead of “what it was like to rub my dachshund.” Then I gave my invention certain properties, chief among them mobility. Love moves. It moves from things that are gone to things that aren’t gone, and all I had to do in life, all anyone has to do in life, was to find those things. Or, as the greeting cards insist is preferable, to let those things find me.
I tried.
I tried for years, Rob. Harder than anybody ever has.
I tried first with a hamster that my mother gave me because it cost less to feed than other pets, but it lacked a chin for me to tickle.
I tried with a bicycle, but it was stolen.
I tried with a character on a TV show, but he didn’t respond to me when I spoke to him or spell my name right when I finally met him at a store where he was signing his books, which I later found out that he hadn’t even written.
I tried with a girl named Lara in junior high, but Lara loved Bo, and one night she told me so.
I tried with Bo. He slugged me in the ribs.
I tried with two Susans, three Elizabeths, a Moira, a Tammi, and Tammi’s little sister—all during a single freshman year.
I tried with the all-male school that I was sent to when the school with the girls in it expelled me for following one of them into her house one night and yelling at her for telling another one that I preferred a third one, which wasn’t true.
I tried with the planet, our lovely planet Earth, and with all the rare, threatened creatures that inhabit it, especially a certain species of salmon. But one summer night in British Columbia, while vandalizing a dam with several friends who were also trying to love the Earth, I watched as a boy who looked a lot like me was swept underwater by giant dam machinery and torn into pieces so small they never surfaced and couldn’t be found by a team of divers, either.
I tried with the dead boy’s college ID card, which he’d left with his shoes on the front seat of my car.
It went on for years, from Tampa to Milwaukee, from Amy to Kathy, from muscle car to mountain bike, and then, when I could afford an Apple computer, from Friendster to MySpace. It tired me out. When the people I tr
ied to love failed to love me back, I altered myself to make myself more lovable, and when they found out that they loved an altered me, they went away in search of someone else. Sometimes the someone else they came across was yet another altered me, which they’d realize when we met in person, causing a lot of trouble I won’t go into. And sometimes the people I found when I searched further were the same people I’d tried to love before, with different hair, new nicknames, and changed hobbies.
Finally, I gave up. And only then, Rob, thanks to a man whom we both know, but whom only I know well, I was shown my original error and set free, just as we hope to set you free before much longer, which is why we’ve worked so hard to bring you here.
There’s a lot more to tell, but I need my guru now. He’s waiting for you with his dog at his apartment. Go get him. I’ll be here.
32.
[MyStory.com]
You’ve left me alone in the hotel room, Rob, and driven off toward Colonel Geoff’s apartment, deeper into the city of false artifacts. Undercover men—what slaves you are! You’re slaves to your superiors, who abuse and oppress you because they’re slaves themselves. You’re slaves to your disguises, which force you to wear the suit of mediocrity. Mostly, though, you’re slaves to your suspicions, which belong not to you but to we who raise suspicion.
And who, these days, can raise it with a few keystrokes, as the colonel set out to do last January when he borrowed Sabrina’s phone (poor dupe) while she was boiling lentils in his kitchen. This is the text message that started everything, the provacative sentence that made the colonel lord and fed the stream of other suggestive utterances—many of them mine—that have kept him lord:
Back in position, operating freely, living like a bloody sheikh, and having a goddamn blast—praise heaven!
He forwarded this to three recipients and three types of devices, whose numbers and addresses came from a long list that I’d picked, almost at random, off the Net. A cell phone used by the madam of a brothel located near a Nevada air force base, a BlackBerry belonging to a publicist, and the “Contact Us” section of the home page of the American Kennel Club in New York. The spell took forty or fifty seconds to cast and exactly nine weeks to bring the entity that it was meant to conjure forth. A magickal welcome, Rob. The colonel knew they’d send someone, and it was you. The only surprise was the route our invitation (and the phone number attached to it) followed to your boss’s desk. We expected that it would be snatched from the ionosphere—and perhaps it was—but it was also, we’re quite confident, passed along terrestrially by the same hot-blooded minuteman at the AKC who immediately texted back as follows to our decoy’s pink Samsung: “i scan the blogs i visit drudge im hip to codes back channels cyber dead drops and say fu 2 all u sobs 4 all the usa.”
But maybe you weren’t privy to much background stuff. Maybe your box is at the flowchart’s edge, with barely any inward-pointing arrows, and all they put in your valise was Sabrina’s name and address. That was the colonel’s first impression, at least, as we followed you through a Whole Foods after I’d flushed you from the brush by illegally asking Peter P. for AidSat’s files on Sabrina Grant and then, apropos of absolutely nothing, by repeatedly bringing her name during Active Angel calls. And here on MyStory, of course, my hotline to the Potomac.
“Not the type they lavish long briefings on,” said the colonel, watching you squeeze honeydews. “I think they gave us Agent 000. Licensed to kill, but has to check with Mommy. That Timex with the Velcro strap definitely doesn’t fire darts. He hasn’t approached you yet?”
“Not yet.”
“But he’s the one?”
“He joined my health club a few days ago. He lifts the same amount of weight no matter what muscle group he’s working on. Leg press or triceps extension—fifty pounds.”
We rounded the corner of the soy milk aisle and there you were again, scooping loose protein powder into a Baggie. You wanted sinew. Sad. Next stop, fish oil for a quicker brain. Then over to skin care for a jar of eye cream and a file to smooth your heels and elbows.
“Preparing for mummification,” the colonel said.
When you left me behind at the hotel here, I assume that you placed me under guard, perhaps by the room-service waiter who brought our dinners but couldn’t answer my questions about the mushrooms mixed with the wild-rice pilaf. Peace, my sentries. Through studying under Colonel Geoff—whom I’ve known somewhat longer than my writings have indicated—I’ve learned to assume that I’m always under guard and, more important, always under scrutiny. Every word that I speak, every message that I write, and every action that I perform (with certain sacred exceptions) is partly addressed, or in some way conscious, of a hovering third party—if not an infinite host of them.
“Lead the Trespasser,” is the colonel’s maxim.
The idea has an interesting history. It comes from a treatise that the colonel cowrote during his service days with a Princeton social anthropologist and an ex-Communist Jewish screenwriter. The colonel nicknamed the myth-op behind the document “Destroy All Saucers!” Its goal was to change the standard Hollywood Martian—that stiff-legged, monosyllabic big-eyed bug that some in the military were convinced was a subversive caricature of the dronelike Cold War soldier—into a more enchanting, more personable “Interstellar Emissary.” Unlike the Martians, who traveled to our planet full of absolutist zeal, intent on either dominating us or saving us from our own ignorance, the IE merely wanted to know humanity, mix with it, and obscurely reassure it that all is well Out There. The Pentagon funded the project, the colonel told me, because its deepest thinkers had grown convinced that moviegoers unconsciously identified beings from space with our nation’s governing class.
That’s where “Lead the Trespasser” came in. In the script that the myth-op hoped to generate (the many scripts, that is, since the IE was a template for all new spacemen, not a onetime-only alien), the earthlings would shrink from the IE at first, and some of them, inevitably, would attack it. These fools would be instantly incinerated, unleashing even greater world anxiety. Soon, however, a wise man would appear and help human beings adopt a subtler strategy toward the visitor. They’d let the IE circulate among them while carrying on with their daily lives. They’d test it, too. They’d drum up a scare about a worldwide drought and hope the IE would show pity and send the rains.
Finally, toward the end, the earthlings would acknowledge the IE and admit to it what they’d been up to. Angry over being toyed with, it would prepare to annihilate mankind. Then the wise man would step in again. He’d suggest that instead of reacting with primal fury, the IE ought to show some civilized respect for an intelligent society capable of engaging it in play. Perhaps a new relationship was possible? The IE could remain as a sort of grand custodian and mediator of disputes, and mankind would supply it with X (X being some substance that the IE required to survive but had run out of back where it was born).
That was the myth-op. The colonel said it failed. Yes, the portrayal of movie spacemen softened (“A bit too much in that Kubrick thing,” he said, “though I did love the fruity purring of that computer”), but the genre soon regressed into juvenile spectacle. Worse, not a single apothegm or dictum from his intensively researched treatise was ever uttered on-screen. This embittered him. Especially after that ponderous silliness “Use the Force, Luke” gained such renown.
I’ve discussed this matter at such length because it explains, I hope, my fearlessness as I sit here at my keyboard, disclosing to you, the imminent third party, all that we, the Anubists, know and will. Soon, our whole project will be plain. It’s not a plot; it’s a procedure. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a practice. That all can master, in their own degrees, but only a few of us have pledged our lives to.
And then there’s you, Rob. The naked undercover man. The incorporated intruder. Who crashed a party posing as a caterer but still doesn’t see that it’s his name on the cake.
On both cakes, actually.
The “Wel
come Home” cake and the “Bon Voyage” cake.
Which cake we’ll serve will be up to you, our guest.
Right now you’re driving north. Because I’m not at work and can’t connect to the pill-size AidSat ear jack chewing-gummed inside your dashboard vent, I don’t know what you’re playing on his stereo. If experience is any guide, it’s either the Eagles’ Greatest Hits or Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours. I’m grateful to you for exposing me to the Sinatra, and I’m grateful as well for Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which I can’t say I’ve managed to watch yet without fast-forwarding but whose title is like a mantra to me now. Its silent repetition clears my mind. Perhaps that’s all minds are made of: words and tunes. I try to let them guide me. Don’t be surprised if six months or so from now a talkative young man named Frank Aguirre starts acting up in Yahoo! chat rooms, listing his favorite slasher films on Netflix, barraging his senators with moody e-mails, and slowly cross-referencing himself to life the way Kent Selkirk did.
I hope it’s the Sinatra that you have on as you turn left onto the colonel’s street. More truth in it. More loss. More need.
Sing with him. Ache with him, Rob.
It might just save you.
33.
[G-mail.com]
[email protected]
Dear Kent,
It’s been twelve hours since I left you, but perhaps because you believe you’re “under guard,” you’re still in the hotel, I notice, living high off the in-room dining menu and enjoying The Da Vinci Code on pay-per-view. You’ve also been online, I see, since we parted. I expected that. And so, rather than driving to the colonel’s and further humoring your dreary fantasies of DC Comics omnipotence, I rode the elevator five floors down to a second room I’d rented, showered, mixed a cocktail from the minibar, spent forty minutes on the phone cooing and bickering with Jesse, and then logged on to MyStory.com to read the post that I knew you’d start composing the moment I left you to yourself.