by Josh Emmons
“I’ve seen pictures of Montgomery Shoale from before 1976,” I said.
“They’re forgeries doctored with imaging software.”
I set down the pictures. The radio was describing a triangle of forest fires incinerating San Bernardino county in southern California. Two men on the street outside Alyosha’s apartment trumped each other in insults until one folded and ran away. Mary looked at me with absolute focus and I kneaded a throw pillow on my lap.
“Your dad was born in Racine, Wisconsin, on October 12, 1947,” I said. “When he was six, his mother left him in the care of an uncle who five years later got run over by a tractor combine. An aunt in Idaho then adopted him and he lived near Sand Point until she died from a snakebite, after which he became a ward of the state. At eighteen he worked for an Arizona firefighting unit, then in an Alaskan cannery, and then on the Long Beach docks before majoring in agribusiness at a small college in Idaho. Between 1971 and 1979 he traveled the world and spent time volunteering at a medical clinic in India. Then he moved to Silicon Valley and became a venture capitalist; in 1983 he met your mother and a year later she died of tuberculosis after giving birth to you. While raising you as a single father he continued to build up his business, and in 1991 he completed transcribing The Prescription for a Superior Existence from UR God’s dictation.”
Mary finished her drink and switched her position to lie front-down on the floor, propped up on her elbows. “There really was a man named Montgomery Shoale who was born in Wisconsin and lived in Idaho, but he died in 1970. My dad stole his identity.”
“That is exactly the sort of thing the Cult Opposition Network would say.”
“Quit thinking about the CON. It was a hoax. Its acronym says as much. I wish you hadn’t had to go through the whole charade, but your stint as a Paser is over. Everyone’s is and you need to deal with it.”
“I disagree.”
“It isn’t a question of your agreeing or not.”
“I want you to take me back now, like you promised.”
“My father plans to kill all of his followers.” She ran a forefinger through the carpet threads in front of her. The radio announcer said that in Japan a physicist had conducted a laboratory experiment expected to lead to cold fusion in the next decade, an energy source that would obviate the need for fossil fuels and radically reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “In a week he is going to order everyone to climb aboard a Synergy device and electrocute themselves.”
The central heating system started up with a muffled clanging and a breath of preliminary cold air hit us.
“That’s—” I said, unable suddenly to understand what the radio announcer was saying, as though the transmission were being scrambled, “then UR God told him when the Last Day will be. At last. This is wonderful news.” My voice caught on the last word and I didn’t want to know why. I didn’t want to know anything, in fact, and wished to go to sleep or to the Center or to my own apartment. Listening to Mary talk about PASE, like watching a sandcastle on the beach, I had a foreboding of an imminent and destructive ending I no more wished to witness than I did the collapse of a day’s work sculpting sand. And from the beginning there was so much longing. I wanted to stand up and walk away. To leave. She couldn’t have prevented my going; I could have kept unsullied what I knew to be sacred.
Mary, her legs entwined behind her, licked all the salt from her glass and said, “For a long time I’ve known that my dad has delusions of grandeur, such as thinking God talks to him, which I’ve accepted for a few reasons. The first is that he raised me after my mom died, and I love him like a father. Another is that he supports me financially, which I know isn’t the most noble reason, but I figured that since his beliefs didn’t hurt anyone there was no point in openly contradicting them. A few times I was tempted to do it anyway, like when I got sick of having to pretend to be a Paser and the privations and compromises seemed too hard.” She stared at her glass and fell silent.
“None of this will matter after the Last Day,” I said. “All of us Pasers will be gone and you won’t have to fake it anymore. Not everyone will embrace the truth.”
She had the expression of a woman whose child has been sent to jail for doing something she knows is wrong, when caring is complicated by distress. “A year ago I was going through my mother’s old boxes looking for a brooch I’d seen on her in a photograph, and I found some letters he wrote to her. Because I was alone, I read them. In the earliest one he said that he wanted to legally adopt her baby when she had it, which means she had been pregnant with me before they got together, which means he’s not my real father. I was shocked and almost went right to him to ask about it, but instead I kept reading and during the course of seven or eight letters I learned the life story I just told you. At first I was disturbed that he had lied to me and to thousands of other people, that he had passed off a fabricated history as real, but still I didn’t do anything about it. I convinced myself that it didn’t change much in essence, and that besides violating my trust, the name he used to promote his made-up religion was irrelevant. I thought that maybe he was just embarrassed for having at one time been such a promiscuous spiritual seeker. Or that maybe he thought UR God told him to do it.”
I didn’t feel well.
She bowed her head to the floor and rubbed her neck and then looked back up. “Have you ever heard of the Faces of PASE campaign?”
I shook my head.
“It’s an operation that gathers damaging information about celebrities and people in power, which it then uses to blackmail and manipulate them. It forces famous people to come out publicly in favor of PASE, to lend their star power and credibility to it. If they refuse, the operation threatens to give the media a full scoop on their homosexuality or drug addiction or infidelities or tax fraud or pedophilia or involvement in some past hushed-up crime. Obviously these people aren’t angels, but to submit them to that kind of treatment, to turn them into PASE puppets, is execrable. In a way it’s worse than what I’ve had to go through. I found out about it six months ago, and ever since I’ve wanted to go public.”
“I don’t believe it.”
She reached over to her handbag and pulled a parcel of envelopes and a newspaper from it. “Here’re copies of my dad’s letters, and here’s a story in yesterday’s New York Times about the French Cultural Minister, François Pissoud. About nine months ago PASE told him they would leak evidence to the press about his visits to prostitutes unless he withdrew opposition to a planned Wellness Center in Marseilles and stated that he’d become a Paser. He went along with it for a while out of fear for his career and marriage, but he left his job yesterday and has now decided to make a stand. This is huge. It’ll inspire others to come out as well and describe how they’ve been strong-armed and coerced.”
The letters rested under the newspaper, which was a blur of two-toned pictures and words, a tableau of lies that history would reverse someday, like the Chicago Tribune’s headline about Dewey beating Truman in the 1948 presidential election. I held the documents in my lap and tried to discern the cant and propaganda and blasphemy driving Mary to say and do this, but unlike when I first met her, and unlike with Tomas and Dr. Cantor, I knew she was telling the truth.
“I don’t believe it,” I repeated, but softer, less forcefully. I read the article. As Mary had said, it explained that Minister Pissoud, citing irreconcilable differences with the French President, had resigned his post and was being divorced by his wife, also because of irreconcilable differences. Consequently he “no longer saw the point of jumping through hoops so an obscure and vindictive California cult could make inroads into France.” Yes, he had hired prostitutes, but that was no one’s business but his own and he would not be anyone’s stooge. It was better to be an honest nobody than a dishonest minister, and he didn’t care how grandstanding that sounded. The picture next to the article showed him marching away from the National Assembly Building in Paris, loosening his necktie. Next I read port
ions of the letters corroborating what Mary had said.
“You’re just upset that you can’t openly have sex,” I said weakly. “You probably wrote these letters yourself to slander your father so you can act on your desires.” The ink from the newspaper stained my fingertips and I rubbed them together, mixing ink and dirt from my skin into little eyelashes that fell to the ground.
“My dad’s plan to put Pasers through ur-Synergy is tantamount to mass murder.”
“This could all be a misunderstanding.”
“The Faces of PASE is about to be exposed; my dad’s health is terrible; there are at most ten thousand Pasers worldwide, probably fewer. The whole thing is falling apart and he’s decided to die and take everyone with him.”
“I’m really tired.”
“Maybe every religion begins this way,” Mary said, “with someone going crazy and thinking they’ve been chosen for a higher purpose, and certainly most religions have blood on their hands, but those crimes are in the past and we can’t do anything about them. Now, though, we know that my dad aspires to kill thousands of people.” She sat up straight and grabbed the pillow I’d been mangling and smoothed and fluffed it on her lap. The letters and newspaper were on the floor, congruent damnations, artifacts of artifice. And although nothing could have been more disruptive or horrible to me personally than what she’d just said, and although it suggested that I give up the progress I’d made as a Paser, come down from a peak untouchable by desire and pain and uncertainty, when Mary scooted forward and I looked at her and our faces were two feet away from each other, I felt, commingled with sadness and disappointment, Synergy. It was part of a range of emotions but still distinguishable, still unmistakably itself, and I thought that instead of the analogies and approximations I’d once used to describe it, Synergy was in fact nothing greater or sweeter or more exalted and transfiguring than—nothing else but a kind of shorthand for, in a language that predates ours and our ancestors’—what all profound philosophies and religions and lives strove to embody and enact, the feeling that inspired and rewarded every higher quest, that had been drained and replenished a million times before the first poem was written, so that it ceased to be a cliché whenever it materialized: love.
Mary said, “You have to stop him.”
“What?”
“You have to stop him from telling his followers to undergo ur-Synergy.”
Like looking from the watery reflection of an object to its solid original, I saw her face assume a permanence it hadn’t had before.
“I would do it myself but his advisers won’t let me near him, supposedly because he’s almost an ur-savant, but really it’s because they know I’m not a Paser and they don’t want me to use my influence with him. What little I have. You’ll be able to see him, though.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No it isn’t.”
“I can’t get an audience with Montgomery Shoale.”
“Yes you can.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The reality of the situation.”
I set down my water glass and looked at Mary, whose face was a blank of determination. “And if I tell him to cancel his plan to put all the Pasers through ur-Synergy, he’ll do it?”
“No,” she said, laying aside the pillow and placing her palms flat on the floor, “he won’t. Unfortunately we have no other option but to forcibly prevent him from going through with it, and the only way to do that is for you to kill him.”
CHAPTER 11
While Mary slept soundly—or at least soundlessly—in the bedroom, I lay on the edge of the futon sweating. The heating system had shut off and I was cold, though my worry generated a compensatory warmth. I read through the letters chronologically, recognizing the handwriting as Shoale’s from a facsimile of the original Prescription I’d studied at the Wellness Center, and thought about the conflicting biographies, the charges of blackmailing, the disputed spiritual authenticity. If PASE weren’t true there was no reason not to get up and drain all of the liquor bottles lining the kitchen counter, to hide behind a wall of inebriation. There was no reason not to eat everything in the refrigerator or climb into bed with Mary. If PASE were untrue, if there were no injunction from UR God, if ultimate reality were the ultimate illusion, I would have to ask why, in the absence of a higher authority than biological dictates, I shouldn’t satisfy my urges and desires and compulsions and wants and needs and cravings. And if one way of life was intrinsically better than or even preferable to another, how without a god or gods were we to discover it? I had spent my entire life either uninterested or unable to answer these questions, as unimaginative as a mannequin dumbly posed for this or that seasonal fashion. I had never known restraint or seen where it led; I had always thought that the capsizes of excess were as necessary as falling while learning to walk. What, though, had I learned from them? Anything as useful as the ability to move myself from one place to another? Anything at all? No other animal but human beings denied themselves pleasure, our past and present abuse of which had become too costly to pursue at the old amounts—we who prioritized growth above all things—and if the supreme generative force in the universe were ever needed it was now.
Of course there were philosophical grounds for temperance and conservatism, earthbound arguments against profligacy and unchecked self-gratification, which perhaps now, holding on to the tatters of my faith as they grew less and less substantial, I needed to adopt. The fire of PASE was about to be extinguished by scandal, and something else had to take its place as a provider of light and heat.
First, though, if I were to follow Mary’s plan, there would be a period of cold darkness.
Hours passed and I went over the details and implications of killing Montgomery Shoale. The act, the aftermath, the price it would exact on all parties. The question wasn’t just should I do it, but could I. Gung-ho soldiers required months of psychological conditioning to kill enemies their government told them had to die. People who committed crimes of passion were left passionless. Murderers motivated by greed—dimestore Raskolnikovs and ladies Macbeth—went mad from their own company. Political and religious assassins were full of a fervor that was in fact mania, the John Wilkes Booths and Lee Harvey Oswalds and Sirhan Sirhans. Cain struck down Abel and in an instant expanded the arc of evil beyond what their parents, the hapless Adam and Eve, had brought about in their primordial garden; he made possible Caesarean patricides and bloody Inquisitions and civil wars and genocides and every manner of human wickedness. To end another’s life was in a way to end one’s own, and however excusable suicide was to those whose souls were besotted with the anguish of here and now and then and there, I shrank from the possibility.
At six o’clock I went to the bathroom and stayed for an hour.
At nine o’clock an alarm rang, an air-raid drone that dropped a precision headache on me. Then the preprogrammed coffeemaker started to hiss and sputter, and I sat leadenly at a card table stacked with Russian-language magazines, my eyes smarting from lack of sleep. Ten minutes later Mary, her hands clasped behind her back in a stretch that pressed her breasts into view, padded into the kitchen area and dragged two clinking cups from a shelf to the counter. The glass pot slid out of its groove.
“I can’t do it,” I said. She poured coffee into each cup as carefully as if at a fund-raising dinner. “Maybe Montgomery Shoale is guilty of everything you say, but I don’t have it in me to kill anyone, especially someone who hasn’t attacked me, especially him.”
She added soy milk to one and paused to examine the resultant brown before adding a splash more, and the gesture, nothing in itself, despite what we were talking about and my resolution not to go along with her and to feel nothing for her, made me smile.
She sipped her coffee down from the brim and crossed the room to sit across from me at the card table, placing my cup handle-side to the right. “Do you know about the Berlin students who plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1943? They called themselves the Whit
e Rose movement, and they were pacifists and so opposed to murder, but they knew that sparing Hitler’s life would condemn millions of innocent people to die, and that a single act of violence against him would prevent a much larger one against others. Everyone now agrees that if they’d succeeded they would have deserved a thousand Nobel Peace prizes. I’m sorry it has to be you now, but that’s the way it goes.”
“Let’s call the media and the FBI and the police, and they’ll stop him from putting everyone through ur-Synergy.”
“The police commissioner is a thumbscrew Paser. The Faces of PASE has proof that he’s made money from heroin seizures over the last ten years.”
“Then he must want PASE exposed and made powerless.”
“No, when it goes down it’ll take everyone else, including him, with it. Besides, the police and the FBI and others can’t arrest someone before they commit a crime unless there’s evidence of a plot, which we don’t have.”
“Tell the newspapers and television news programs; have them get the message out. It’s sensational enough that word would spread everywhere in a couple of days.”
“There, too, a lot of prominent national editors are afraid to broadcast anything negative about PASE for fear of what would surface about them. And if I were somehow able to get a big national forum for the announcement—or even just post it on the Internet—PASE would deny it and say that I was bitter because my father cut me off financially when he heard that I violated PASE principles. Some people would believe me, but Pasers wouldn’t. Like you did last night, they’d say I’m not a credible witness.”
I was about to raise another important objection when a knock came at the door. Mary slapped her hand over my mouth and shook her head. Then, removing her hand, she rose and slipped to the door and looked through the keyhole, her left arm stretched back as though to restrain onlookers at a crime scene, her left toes planted and heel up on point position.