“Only if Truth is a drug.”
A couple of other people came up to us. They stood very close.
“Oh is this the man you were embroiled with on the misery-plane?!” observed a fellow in his thirties. He had a healthy look about him. Most of the others didn’t look so hot.
“Yes,” said Mandy.
“Mandy, I think we should leave.”
“Oh, her name isn’t ‘Mandy’ anymore.”
I turned to Mandy. She was nodding.
“It’s Perserverance,” the man said.
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“Oh, that’s the amazing thing about this—how ‘stupid’ turns into ‘perfect’ here!” said a woman standing two inches from me. She had dust-colored hair and filmy glasses.
The group of people around Mandy and I was growing. Soon I couldn’t see beyond the circle of people pressing in around us. It was hot and everybody’s face looked tired and oily.
“Why are you all standing so close?”
Everybody in the group laughed too enthusiastically. Mandy also laughed.
“Remember everybody? How it was? Before?” a man shouted.
“How YOU were you mean, Harvest!” answered a woman in a long dress.
“Oh, I think YOU were that way too, Trajectory!” the man kidded back. The room erupted in riotous laughter.
“The wonderful thing is that we can finally admit that we were ALL that way!” Heliotrope said. The hot circle of people broke into a round of applause.
“Just listen to Him talk. You’ll see what this is all about.” Mandy said.
“Him? Who’s ‘Him’?” I asked.
The healthy-looking man who had first butted in leaned in between Mandy and I and covered his mouth with his hand as if telling me a secret. He was wearing a nylon track suit.
“Watch out! You might just UNLEARN something!”
“Oh ha ha! Ha ha!” a woman near him tittered.
At that moment a voice from outside the huddle announced that “the transmission is going to begin.” I felt nauseous and dizzy. Several people led Mandy away from me. The healthy-looking fellow took me by the arm. “Couples who were embroiled before they got here are kept separate. My name is Filament,” he said and patted me on the back of my head.
Everybody sat down in the chairs. I was given a seat near the front. Heliotrope, the woman who had lured me there in the first place, sat next to me and smiled at me intently every once in a while. My new friend Filament sat on the other side. I noticed that Filament and Heliotrope kept staring at one another.
“Do you two want to sit next to each other?” I asked.
“Oh no!” said Heliotrope, embarrassed. “We’re bookending you.”
Filament smiled and nodded.
Once everybody was seated, the room quieted down. After a few moments I heard a humming noise. I realized that everybody in the room was humming a single tone. The group tone created a mesmerizing collective idiocy. I unconsciously started to hum right along with them but I stopped myself. I took a quick look around to see if I could spot Mandy but they must have buried her in the back somewhere. The crowd was normal looking, like everybody else in the world, but more child-like.
A door towards the rear of the living room opened. A man walked in wearing a frayed red bathrobe. The man was short and slender. He had a large mess of black hair and wore sunglasses. He was unshaven and walked slowly. He was about forty-five or so. People kept humming, but now the buzz was punctuated with loud exclamations from people around the room.
“Miller!”
“It’s Miller! The one that solves disease!”
“Miller! We want the transmission!”
“Step near us walking man!”
“Write the book, big friend!”
“We’re nothing but shit! Help!”
Miller stood in the cleared area at the front of the room and waited until the shouting died down. Once it was silent he waited a while longer. His sunglasses were totally black. He kept his gaze directed to the far distance. When he began speaking his voice was quiet and droning but was audible in the vacuum of people straining to hear. He started as though in the middle of a discourse rather than at the beginning.
“So, when you have a problem, you have to actually realize that the problem has the problem. That’s why I’m here.”
He paused. The pause went on for a long time.
Finally, he said, “I’m the Real Meal.”
“Thank you, teacher!” somebody shouted.
“Let me explain: all the problems are over when you realize that the solution is the absence of the problem. I’m like the big absence. A lot of you came here with relationships. Here, we say that you were embroiled in relationships. That means you were being broiled. The thing about being broiled is that when you’re well done, you’re dead.”
Everybody in the room was transfixed.
“Some of you came here with money or maybe with no money. I eat all of it. I eat your ‘have’ and I eat your ‘have-not.’ I’m the Big Void. Look, I don’t want to convince you of anything. What I’m trying to do here is unconvince you of things that you never really believed in the first place. It’s called unlearning. You’re going to find out that things can come out of your own mind which are pretty golden. You just have to get rid of the lead. What do you think they mean by ‘get the lead out’?”
“Miller, we don’t know!” an overweight woman with a headband whined. Other people in the room shrugged and laughed.
“They mean that you should get moving! Let me ask you this: Have you ever tried to move when you’re bogged down with a thousand pounds of garbage? I’m the psychic garbage man. I don’t claim to be or to do anything. This isn’t about Miller. This is about the fact that Miller doesn’t exist. That’s why I can eat your garbage. I’m the Nothing Man. Your problem is that you exist too much. And I’m not saying you have a problem. You are a problem. Lay it down right here, friends.”
He stood totally still. He gestured with his hand while he spoke. There was no movement in his wrist so that the arm-hand moved stiffly as if it were a single apparatus. It was weird but compelling.
“Friends, and I mean friends, I am not here to lecture you. You are here to avoid being nowhere. Look, look at TIME. All day long you plod and plot. Let me say something: get your feet out of the toilet and start walking the big circle! Need instructions? I don’t have any. What I do have is a way for you to get free of your own disease. I solve disease by doing something with your fixation. The thing I do is unfix it. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right? But if it’s not fixed, you don’t have to worry about it breaking in the first place.”
“Aaaaaah,” responded the group.
“Society is playing a big game with you people. I’m like the referee with an empty rulebook. Can you understand that? I give you new names but all I’m really doing is letting you put your hands in the cake and see if you’re still hungry. Of course you’re going to feel hungry if you’re looking in the window at all those cakes!” he shouted angrily.
A dark-complexioned man sitting in the same row as me had tears in his eyes.
“People, all I’m trying to do is take your eyes off the goddamned cakes!” Miller pleaded. He went cold again: “Let’s start from the beginning. Slavery is over. But unless you know that you were a slave in the first place, you can’t get that it’s over. This is the transmission. This is the whole Transmission.”
The talk went on for two hours. Miller talked about having your feet in the toilet and outer space and how cars drove people around and how the biggest enemy of all was bread. He covered a lot of ground. I went into a daze after a while. The man had unbelievable stamina. Finally, at around midnight he opened up the floor for questions. I was nodding off. Filament kept putting his hand on my shoulder and nodding. “You’re do
ing great,” he reassured.
“Miller,” shouted a black woman near the back of the room, “Why is it that people don’t understand us?”
“Thank you, Emergency. When I named you Emergency, it was because you EMERGE-AND-SEE. Let me explain something. The big problem with people is that they DO understand us. You see? We’re the ones who DON’T understand. That’s why we are free of disease. As long as they keep UNDERSTANDING, they are riding on the misery boat. When we got free of our misery-lives we didn’t need to ‘understand’ anymore, we just do what we do while they don’t what they don’t.”
“Miller,” asked somebody else, “are you God?” People around the room laughed.
“Yes. Is that what you want me to say? No. No, no, no, no. YES! Right? That’s the game we keep playing. What’s God? Who’s God? Are you God? Hmmm!” He acted out his perplexity by scratching his head and looking upwards.
“Miller, you’re a dazzler, a real Merlin—how did you come to be so wondrous?” This woman was bleary-eyed and in her fifties. She was wearing a long flowered dress and seemed optimistic in a way that was outdated. She looked like a veteran of many craft fairs.
“Remind me of this woman’s new name?” Miller asked the group.
“I love how human he is!” a man behind me whispered.
“You named her ‘Bitch,’ Miller,” somebody reminded him.
“Oh yes. Bitch, I am wondrous because I am willing to dispense with the sludge and misery of mundane life. That’s what God is. God is dispensing.”
It went on and on. After a while I just started getting angry. Every time my head dipped into sleep and I had to haul it back up I became angrier. All the questions had resolved into talk about God. Finally, I decided to ask something myself, if only to stay awake. But I was delirious now and didn’t even know what to say.
“I don’t believe in God!” I shouted mindlessly. The room went silent as Miller turned toward me.
“Name him! Give him a new name!”
“Miller! We accept him!”
“Say it again, friend,” said Miller.
“I don’t believe in God!” I said, this time less defiantly.
“The God you don’t believe in isn’t the one I’m worried about.”
Everybody in the room applauded. Filament massaged my shoulder.
“Welcome, New Friend. We’ll call you ‘Refund,’” Miller said.
“Refund! Refund!” the group shouted. Several people came over and touched me warmly.
After that it was time to go to sleep. Miller left the room unceremoniously and everybody went off to different parts of the house. I saw Mandy leaving with Heliotrope. I started to go over there but Filament took me by the arm and led me down a different hallway and up some stairs. There were several bedrooms along the hallway upstairs. All the doors had been removed from the bedrooms.
“We function as a single organ,” Filament explained.
In the bedroom there were two small cots. I sat on one. It was too late to catch the train back to the city and I didn’t want to leave until I talked to Mandy.
Filament undressed. He looked like a swimmer, a triathelete.
“I was a physical education major over at UC Berkeley until I met Miller,” Filament said. “The transmission has changed all of that. I can see you are starting to pick up Miller’s glow.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I’m going to be your Launch Friend. I’ll be with you for the first couple weeks.”
“My Launch Friend?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“What’s that?”
“Somebody to help you avoid logic.”
“Why? Why would you want to avoid logic?”
“Miller would say that your question is eating it’s own answer.”
“What would you say?”
Instead of answering, Filament puffed out his cheeks and pantomimed chewing. Then he smiled and squeezed my shoulder.
I lay down. He turned off the light. The hours of weird talk had turned all my thoughts into rivulets of flowing mud. I lay there in the mud. Filament went to sleep instantly. I fell asleep after a while and dreamed of Miller talking and talking. In my dream I thought to myself, Well there is something about him…
I woke up after a couple of hours. Renewed by sleep I had less patience for it all.
“Filament?”
“Yes, Refund?”
“Please don’t call me that. Listen, I need to talk to Mandy.”
“Refund, it’s very important that the two of you DON’T talk.”
“Look, I really need to talk to her. After that, we won’t talk.”
“Look, it’s critical that you two DON’T talk.”
“I just want to ask her a couple things about what’s going on here.”
“Hey, it’s kind of important that the two of you actually DON’T talk,” he said soothingly. We lay back down. I remembered him and Heliotrope staring at one another.
“Listen, Filament, I noticed her leaving the room with Heliotrope. Is Heliotrope Mandy’s ‘Launch Friend’?”
“Yes.”
“Well listen, maybe I could go talk to Mandy and you could talk to Heliotrope?”
“Well, they actually say that there shouldn’t be a lot of talk in that way.”
“I know but maybe you could talk to her and I could talk to Mandy and then that would be it. After that, no talk. No more talk.”
After a few minutes I convinced him of it. People will always find a way to agree with what they actually want to do.
Filament led me down the hall and down the steps. The floorboards creaked. We had to go very slowly because it was noisy and there were no doors on the bedrooms. We crept through the house and down the stairs. Finally we got to the room we wanted.
Mandy was in there with Heliotrope. Filament went over and woke Heliotrope up. I woke Mandy up.
“Mandy, wake up! I’m here!”
“Noah?”
“Yes!”
“Noah?”
“Yes.”
“Noah?”
“Stop it.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand why you’re down here.”
“Wake up.”
“I’m awake.”
“Look, Mandy, what is this shit? Let’s get out of here.”
“No, wait, you have to hear more about it.”
“Why?”
“Miller has a plan.”
“What is it?”
“You have to listen.”
“I listened tonight. He was making me go crazy. Although I admit there’s something about him.”
“Do you like it?”
“No.”
“Give it a shot, Noah.”
“This is a cult.”
“See? You’re always making blunk statements like that. You’re always painting everything with one brush and making a big blunk statement.”
“It’s not a ‘blunk’ statement, it’s just how it looks to me. Who is going to feed your dog now?”
“My landlord is doing it. I got her to do it after I sent you the last letter.”
“Listen, since you were going to San Francisco anyway to watch me move my fern around in front of my window, why didn’t you just feed the dog yourself?”
“They are trying to disembroil me from my apartment. It was all I could do to get them to let me go back to the city to make sure you were taking care of him. I insisted on it though. Actually, there was a big meeting about it. I told them I was going to get out of here if they wouldn’t at least let me make sure you were feeding Bubbles. Then they had a big meeting that lasted two hours. I was just about to walk out and then Miller said I could make sure you were doing it. I think they will probably just let me go get him in a day or two.”
“Oh.”
“I knew you would come find us!” she said and hugged me. “They wouldn’t let me call you so I put it in code in the last letter. Heliotrope is my friend. She said she would get you up here if I could get you to the spa. That relaxation seminar is where they scout out candidates.”
“Well this place bothers me.”
“Oh, because some of the people are stupid?”
“No, it’s not that. I lived in a big house like this for a couple of years when I was going to school. Not far from here, actually.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“No. My parents took care of the house for somebody. They were both addicted to pills. I read books all day.”
“Wow, Noah! You never told me about that!”
“Well, there you have it.”
Filament and Heliotrope were making out and groping each other over on the other cot. There was a lot of gasping and grabbing.
“Jesus!”
“I know!” Mandy replied.
“Look, Mandy, I’m going to listen to one more of these transmissions and then I’m going to get the fuck out of here! I’ve got a class on Monday, I don’t have time for this shit.”
“But you are going to listen to one more? That’s great!”
“I don’t know if it’s great.”
“It’s great!”
We embraced and kissed. Any intimacy was destroyed by the mouthy noises of Filament and Heliotrope.
“Noah, you better go! I think if they keep at it they are going to try and fuck each other!”
“You got that right.”
“Look, you really shouldn’t be caught down here!”
“Okay.”
I pried Filament off of Heliotrope. He was still panting as we snuck back.
The next day everybody gathered in the living room. They were all very excited because there was going to be a rare morning transmission. Again, I was kept separate from Mandy. Talking was discouraged. Rice was served in colored plastic bowls that had done too many dishwasher tours. Then it all began. Everybody started humming. Miller emerged: bathrobe, hair, unshaven face, and opaque black sunglasses. The humming turned into shouting. He was disheveled, as he had been yesterday.
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