The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  “Backers, that’s what I’m after all the time,” Madison says. “Always hustling for backers.”

  “The sad part of it,” Zimri says, emboldened, “is that an era is kind of fading away. An era when the markets were parched for innovation. Four or five years ago, there was this feeling that if you had an idea and you knew how to talk to it, then you were going to monetize that idea. I imagine the same thing is true in the movie business, that it’s really no different from agriculture. You need the seed money and you need to tend to the crops to make sure they flourish. Most people only respect marketing, because the genius of real ideas is threatening to them. The people who come up with ideas are always the ones with the wild eyes.”

  She likes watching his mouth. Nothing is sexier than agricultural metaphors, really. They’re so earthy. But it’s sort of irritating to Madison that she can’t instantly figure out what’s wrong with Zimri Enderby, because there must be something wrong besides the button-down collars and that piece of chana saag on his incisor—should she tell him?—and she wishes she could ask about his strange Mormon sheets and his years as a teenage missionary. Because somewhere in there is the concealed gay affair, or the episode of sexual abuse, or the binges at Indian casinos. The secret is in there somewhere and only God knows what it is. Does he have to wear a different ring for each of the seven underage wives?

  “Venture capitalists used to think like poets. They were dreamers, they were renegades. And now it’s starting to look like those doors are going to be closed for a long while. And that’s why I’d like to make a leap into content, you know, because content is forever. The world always needs the artists and dreamers. I appreciate the energy on the content end of the Internet story. You know, out West, back when everyone was a rancher or working the fields, there were the stars to navigate from. Men would be out in the fields with the livestock, looking up at the stars. And that was their entertainment. Stars and a campfire crackling in the desert. There are no stars here in the city, except the poets and dreamers and actors and filmmakers, the content providers, so that’s where I want to concentrate my attention.”

  Soon after, they swap cards, and she heads for the office, checking in, on the way, with the women of Vanderbilt Publicity to offer an affidavit that, yes, the hair is wheat colored and, no, there doesn’t seem to be any ring on his ring finger and, yes, he is in possession of her number and, yes, he is too perfect to be true, and has he maybe RSVP’d for anything they’re doing, in the way of parties, you know, the next few nights? She would like to know so she can clear her schedule, but she says all these things because the cynic is a lapsed something or other, everybody knows that. How quickly does the lapsed something or other begin to hope? Hope is in robin’s-egg blue, tucked into the leaves of a book, like a Victorian flower. Hope is a perfumed envelope, and she can feel a little bit of a spring in her step. She hates it. She hates the hoper in herself. She notices that she accidentally flipped her hair when saying good-bye to him, and all those girls who flip their hair, blondes, always flipping their hair, what is it with them, is it a neurological thing? It should be in the catalogue of neurological disorders next to Tourette’s, and so it’s best to disconnect the cell phone and go back to the office and submit to Vanessa, who wants to know all about the Mormon guy, is he a Jack Mormon, which apparently means a Mormon who’s not a Mormon, and she asks, of course, “Were you attracted to him? Tell me you didn’t agree to go out on a date or anything, because you just can’t fuck up the business relationships with these guys by going out on dates with them, okay? And what projects did you talk to him about?”

  Madison, in front of a bowl of Swedish fish, admits to Otis Redding. She admits to Stradivarius.

  “You didn’t tell him about The Diviners?”

  “What’s The Diviners?”

  “The miniseries.”

  “What miniseries? Since when is it a miniseries?”

  “Since this morning, which you would know if you bothered to come into the office in the morning. Now I want you to get the writer on the phone and tell him to put something about water rights in western states into the treatment. And maybe Native American turquoise. Western guys love turquoise.”

  “Who’s the writer?”

  “It’s based on a novel by Marjorie Howell Finkelstein; I think she’s a big features writer for women’s magazines. I think she wrote the treatment herself, but we have to get a different writer on the project. There’s no way we can work with her. I called Vic Freese this morning, he claims to be repping it, but I told him we had already optioned the story and that we were going to bring all of our resources to bear on the project. We were going to make it our project.”

  Vanessa gets up, absently rubbing her neck as though it’s a magic lantern that will yield ever greater reservoirs of falsehood.

  “Did you actually option it?”

  “We have to find Marjorie Howell Finkelstein and we have to option it before you go home tonight. Find out who her agent is, track her down. Get on it. Get western water rights into the treatment, and turquoise, and Indians, and have a copy of it on the Mormon guy’s desk tomorrow, with a budget sketched out. And here, have a Swedish fish.”

  Then Vanessa does a thing she never does. She gets ready to leave early. She says she is going out for drinks, even though it’s only three in the afternoon. The dingy black raincoat flies around Vanessa as though she’s a vampire, and she’s out the door. Madison remains behind, leaning against the flimsy divider of Annabel’s cubicle.

  “Any idea where the hell I’m supposed to find Marjorie Howell Finkelstein?”

  “I think it’s Melanie Horace Fahnstock,” Annabel says. “That’s the writer’s name.”

  “Any idea how to contact her?”

  “I might be able to find out.”

  “Never mind. I’ll do it.”

  Thaddeus comes out of his lair with a crumpled-up piece of paper and, in front of the assembled (Jeanine off in the distance, looking like an orthopedist’s brochure on bad posture), he attempts to do some kind of double-pump layup thing into the trash barrel.

  “Do you know anything about this Finkelstein woman?” Madison asks, though she tries to avoid talking to him. “The one who wrote this Diviners thing. Are we really supposed to be taking it seriously?”

  “You’re definitely supposed to be taking it seriously, and I think the writer’s name is Fedderman, actually. Melanie Fedderman. There’s some middle name, too, because, you know, genre writers, they always have a middle name or two in there. The story has enormous promise, by the way.”

  “Nobody gives a shit about any miniseries now. We should do a show where attractive girls, like, show their cervixes to advertisers. That would make a splash.”

  Annabel says, “I’ll write up a proposal.”

  Thaddeus says, “My agent knows her agent. Want me to make the call?”

  “I’m supposed to make some kind of offer.”

  Mrs. DiNunzio rustles past, carrying a couple of files. The office poltergeist.

  11

  It’s near upon feeding hour, and everyone, in gowns and slippers, is working his or her way out of the sunless crevices of the ward and heading for the nurses’ console. Rosa Elisabetta, a leafless sapling in terry cloth robe and slippers, is ahead of the curve, ahead of the men climbing out of their beds. Men, festering, uremic, unshaven. She hasn’t made their acquaintance, doesn’t intend to. They tremble like candle flames at the end of their wicks. A strong breeze would blow them out. Still, near to the feeding hour, they bring forth untapped reservoirs of life, morbid jokes, gallows humor, toothless smiles.

  “Go listen to the lecture,” the nurse says to her, waving in the direction of the common area, with its ample but depressing population of houseplants. “Don’t be hanging around here.”

  “I already know all that they’re going to say.”

  “If you knew, you wouldn’t be here.”

  The nurse’s tone is patently offensive, as a
re her press-on fingernails. But Rosa is insubstantial, like the others, and when she reaches out for things, when she puts the flat part of her palm on the nurse’s console, the result is complicated. The palm is stretched as though testing plane geometry, swooping down over the console. Her palm is a bird. Moments seem to pass, and then she feels the smoothness of it, the console. She locks eyes with the nurse, whose name she has forgotten. Rosa doesn’t even know for certain if she has seen this unnamed nurse before. The nurse’s eyes are big and brown and bloodshot, as if she has wept on duty. The nurse is shooing her, waving her away, as though Rosa is an insect, and what Rosa watches in particular are the nurse’s hands.

  “Repetition of key concepts,” this unnamed nurse continues.

  Bodies toddle down the corridor at the leisurely pace of detoxification. Jocular exchanges between the penitential. It takes Rosa an interminable length to turn and look at what the unnamed nurse is pointing at, namely, the death march of the addict population. “Take suggestions. Go to the lecture.”

  Rosa Elisabetta nods, in keeping with a diminished vocabulary of dignity that is native here. And then she moves away from the console and she does her best, reaching for intermediate clinging stations, which are located around her. There is a doorknob, which is certainly a clinging station, on the way to the common room where the lecture is taking place. Also a water fountain. And here is a leaning station, by the fire stairs. Almost there. She is at the threshold of the lecture, and what she can see is that the lecturer is covered with tattoos. She can see that he’s African American and he’s smiling. She believes she is hearing a repetition of key concepts, and the words are drifting. Surrender to win, sick and tired of being sick and tired, one day at a time, let go, let God. The lecturer makes use of strategic drifting. He harnesses drifting terminologies, and they are almost percussive. Or else there is an echolalia, which is a pathological repetition of key concepts, as when the medication level goes down. She dreads the medication level going down because then there is the possibility of seizure. Again.

  There are these things she hears. Earlier in the day, she heard things, she heard importunings, beseechments, and last night she heard things, all of it in a language of desire, as if want were never expressed in American English before, as if it were only expressed in these affected parts, where desire and rage are in a state of riot. Maybe these voices in her affected parts are annealed by this strategic repetition, and maybe she is redeemed by medication, because she knows, or thinks she knows, that the man who is asleep in the chair in front of the lecturer, one of four people attending, has not moved from that chair for several hours, not even to face in the direction of the television monitor, which for most of the afternoon has been tuned to talk shows. These shows are a clinging station. A clinging station is a station that must be visited prior to release. It must be wiped clean afterward.

  The lecturer says something about how pleased he is to see her there, but she doesn’t respond. There is a windowsill and there is the temporary pleasantness of going to a windowsill and of seeing something out the window. She has a sense of the window as an opening, onto a street, and a street opening onto a city, and a city opening onto a nation, and she considers these openings, but she forgets the particular relationship between these things, window, outside, grid system, nation, heavenly body. Her hand flutters up to the window, to touch it and to feel that it’s cold. And it’s a surprise, as if a dove has suddenly alighted on the scene.

  The lecturer offers some further repetition of key concepts to the seats in front of him, where those four bodies are strewn as though air-dropped. And he looks over at Rosa Elisabetta, touching the window. And then he returns to his praises of God and sobriety. Getting from the window to an unoccupied seat takes a sequence of muscle contractions. A shoulder of an unconscious man is a clinging station. It’s as though she is part of some peristaltic massage, having swallowed herself in an attempt to purge all things from her body. The taking in and the excreting outward. Rigors of motion seem as if they are happening on the inside, even though they are probably happening on the outside. Eventually, she is in one of the seats in front of the lecturer, and it has taken her so long to get there that it appears that the lecturer is done with his presentation. Now he is giving his telephone number to a man in the front row, one of the few alert enough to understand. Then he comes to stand in front of her.

  “How many days? If I may ask?”

  Rosa Elisabetta raises her hand, provisionally, holds up the fingers.

  “Three days, three days. No complaining about three days. Three days is better than no days.” Here he takes her hand for a moment. Many perils to be considered in the interior of the ward, like being incarcerated with liars and drug addicts and petty criminals and fornicators, and these are so preoccupying, these perils, that she has not got around to avoiding germs. Under other circumstances, Rosa Elisabetta would recoil from allowing an African American man covered with tattoos to take her hand, but there’s no time for that now because she forgot to think about it, and this is an instant in a vast conspiracy, and she doesn’t know how to stop it exactly, the recognition of simultaneities, and so her hand is now in the massive palm of the lecturer, and because there is no time to stop the events spinning around her, there’s no time to resist being held lovingly by an African American lecturer.

  If time were expressed as a sequence of hands, then time has all but stopped, since it is eons, epochs, since either of the hands belonging to Rosa Elisabetta was entrapped in the hand of another. Her daughter is not exactly a hand-holder type, a sentimentalist. This thought dawns on her with reasonable clarity. There is this thought, and there is the hand of the lecturer, which is the leather recliner of hand-holding hands. It is pale at the palm, elsewhere dark, and it is thick, meaty, where others would be bony. In his hand, hers is shriveled, with laces of vein and artery. She is in a state of considering geologic time where a single breath in the passed-out heroin addict in the chair nearby is reduced to an infinite series of partial decisions and undertakings. That’s how long her hand is in the lecturer’s hand, that’s how long she is experiencing gratitude, before he says, “I’ll say a little prayer for you.” Then back to the light speed of things overtaking, repetition of key concepts, nurses urging them down the hall to the dining room. Carts bearing the trays go by, rubber wheels moaning on the linoleum. Addicts totter after, because they will follow any smells, even if they are the same smells as last night, namely, fruit juice container, three spears of broccoli boiled until nearly liquefied, freeze-dried carcass of chicken, and a half-dozen french-fried potatoes still icy in their centers.

  Somehow she finds a leaning opportunity in the dining room, bearing up her tray, and she is attempting to blow a long gray tangle of hair out of her face, away from affected parts, as she sits. With grim determination, she opens the juice and takes the plastic utensils from their plastic sleeve. Women are rare here, but still there is a young woman, no older than her daughter, sitting opposite. And the young woman rips into her unsubstantiated chicken as if this were the first hospital dinner ever consumed. Rosa Elisabetta is impressed with the display. Around the room, the sleepers attempt to eat faster than seawater turns boulders to sand, sometimes successfully.

  The girl says, “Hey, can you answer a question?”

  Rosa raises an eyebrow.

  “Do you think I should tell them that I’m bleeding? I’ve been bleeding for ten days. I never bled like this before. I was living in a squat, so I just didn’t get that much to eat. Know what I mean? Now I’m bleeding. Man, you can’t believe. Like there’s a mouse in me doing flips. Know what I mean?”

  “I can’t —” Rosa says. And then, as if the question were a marvel, “Your name?”

  Her name is Dee. Rosa whispers the name after hearing it spoken. So simple it might be possible to commit it to memory at some point. Rosa nods, as if by nodding she can get across a spectrum of advice. Run, don’t walk, where the bleeding is concerned.
The girl seems to say something. Not like there are a lot of women to talk to. The girl gestures around the room, as if to prove her hypothesis. True, there is Rosa and her roommate, an obese woman who has not yet risen from her bed. This obese woman had something injected and then she slept, and she’s sleeping still. And then there’s the girl, Dee, and apparently Dee doesn’t have a roommate, although she probably will, maybe tonight. People are coming and going. Remarks, which are observations, get condensed down to elemental gestures in her affected parts. Rosa looks at thinking from an angle and then she looks at it from another angle. She seems not to get around to saying much.

  “Want to play cards later?”

  Unclear. How many transactions in this marketplace of detoxified ideas would be involved in the playing of cards? The idea of later is almost impossibly complex, and Rosa cannot commit. In fact, while she’s turning it over in her mind, dinner has come to an end.

  “Rosa, try just eating the broccoli.”

  The nurses treat her as though she’s never heard of food, as though food has never traversed the boundaries of inside and outside, as though digestion has never before degraded her, as though she has never had a seven-course meal with a pasta course and a meat course. With the resistance to these commands she feels a little more like herself; nevertheless, she does eat the broccoli, which tastes like air. And then, using the chair as a clinging station, she rises up, last to leave, and carries her tray to the cart.