The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  Maiser kicks aside a few busted bricks while he watches. He wipes a slick of hundred-proof perspiration from his forehead. There’s only one purpose for a wall out here in the elements. There’s only one purpose for this wall on the day for which team-building exercises are called in the schedule. It’s the Obstacle Course.

  He hails the poor sons of bitches from Mexico who are working hard and trying not to get shipped back across the border. “Muchachos? Hola!” A guy with a Padres cap on backward and a goatee dusts off his hands and comes over slowly, as though it’s a chore.

  “It’s okay, sir. We speak English.”

  “Sorry to bother you. Do you guys have any idea why you’re building this wall? Any idea at all?”

  “We’re told to build a wall to certain specifications. We build a wall.” He gestures at it as if it’s a thing of beauty.

  “That wall looks like it could easily hold a very large man or woman,” Maiser says, expecting no reply. The implications are there for anyone to see. Without taking leave of the laborers, he trudges back along the road to his casita. In the meantime, of course, the more ambitious corporate managers are coming in from the putting green in their smart little golf carts, looking tanned, rested, and self-satisfied.

  Jeffrey Maiser should be happier about being right, about the wall, about the tragic course of the management off-site, about human nature in general. But he’s not happy about being right, insight and contentedness being on opposite ends of life’s superstructure. Within a half hour, he will be here, unbreakfasted, slouching in front of the wall, getting instructions from some management consultant bonehead. As usual, Maiser will not be listening carefully, precisely because the facts of daily life have a shocking tendency to be easily forecasted, and he still has not written the essay required by Naz Korngold, nor has he completely filled out the MMPI; I used to like to play hopscotch and jump rope, false or mostly false?

  There is now a rope affixed to the wall and it is swaying gently. And Jeffrey Maiser is standing in front of the wall next to some of the most important people in the Universal Beverages Corporation family. Stew Ledbetter, the president of the beverages division, who looks and smells as if he has recently emptied the contents of his stomach; Leslie Aaronson, the thirty-one-year-old head of the UBC film studio, who will probably be out of a job in under a year, just like the last three studio heads; himself, Jeffery Maiser, one of the most driven, respected, and astute minds in television; and Len Wilkinson, the word guy.

  Boy, does he fucking hate Len Wilkinson. If Ibn Al-Hassad had devoted a portion of yesterday’s speech, a mere bulleted point, a fancy software-enhanced graph, to the greatest enemy of Growing Quality, Maiser missed it, but he knows nonetheless that the greatest enemy to Growing Quality is “dissension in the ranks.” Naz Korngold, if he remembers correctly, mentioned it at dinner last night before Maiser’s brownout. Naz pointed out how it was the natural tendency of people during “times of crisis” to begin to “take it out on one another.” It was natural for there to be an upsurge of “dissension in the ranks.” And yet in truth, this was a time to “pull together,” according to Naz, a time to “keep our eyes on the prize.” The implication being, perhaps, that Maiser is himself one of the problems, a guy who trusts nobody, who keeps his own counsel, who is merciless and solitary, like a timber wolf.

  There’s one good reason for trusting no one, and that reason is Len Wilkinson.

  Wilkinson came up through corporate communications, straight out of some state school, University of Ohio, maybe, where he’d been a sportswriter. He had great dreams of a journalistic vocation ahead. And there he would have stayed if not for a moment of stunning creativity, the kind of breathtaking moment that can really launch a career. That moment was the composition of the expression “inspired by a true story.” Yes, somebody had to be the coiner and promoter of this piece of etymological flab, and that somebody was Len Wilkinson, who’d gotten his start in the mail room at UBC films. It was not long after that the studio was having a bad spell. Nothing was doing the kind of business it ought to have done. UBC had worked the market for sequels for a good five or six years, and still the public was less excited about the sequels than the superior original products. Wilkinson was given the task of writing a press release for a little-known telefilm, developed by the studio and cross-marketed to the network, based on the wartime career of a recent president of the United States, and in the midst of this press release, he had described the film as “inspired by a true story,” with all the religious nuances implied. He went on, of course, to argue in meetings that television had no mission to document but rather to “inspire.” Naturally, the press release was recast in a dozen major reviews for the film, so much so that “inspired by a true story” became an industrywide, if not global, standard.

  He didn’t stop there. Wilkinson later repeated his theory of television in various offices in such a way as to bring down the head of television production, whose name Maiser can’t even remember, arguing that television was a medium of modest ambitions in the first place. People who watched television knew and accepted the origins of the form, vaudeville and old-time radio. They weren’t interested in the news division and its veracity, they were not interested in current events. And television news was inferior to news sources available elsewhere anyhow. The key to television was to develop mythologies that had some of the allure of news programming without the bitter aftertaste of factuality. Jeffery Maiser would have been impressed with the naked ambition of the man if he didn’t hate so much about Wilkinson, who loved televised golf, who didn’t drink, who had a comb-over, and who wore cardigan sweaters in the office.

  Of course, once the “inspired by a true story” formula began to lose its PR luster, which it did inevitably, Wilkinson began to argue precisely the obverse, in yet another attempt to curry favor with Naz Korngold’s floor. The next Wilkinson coinage, the phrase of the new millennium, the phrase of the postmodern television ethos that had brought about such must-see events as the confirmation hearings of a certain Supreme Court justice, the murder trial of a certain football player, this week’s contested election, et cetera, was “enhanced reality.”

  The other networks were developing the idea, too, like sows thundering toward a trough of rotting vegetable rinds. That game show about wanting to be a millionaire, the couples on the island where their commitments were tempted, the jungle Machiavellians, and so forth. It should have been called “enhanced avarice programming.” But no. Wilkinson had written the first press release in which “enhanced reality” was explicated as such. It was a way for Americans to see how Americans really behaved. It was edgy! It was enhanced! And even though Maiser had signed off on the first twelve episodes of American Spy, the UBC enhanced-reality product in which contestants competed to be the best possible espionage agents by spying on neighbors and associates, evaluated in their performance by retired military intelligence specialist Norm “Star” Spangler, he could feel intuitively that the “enhanced reality” programming model was really about eliminating programming. The long-term goal was the elimination of the mythologies that Wilkinson had prized earlier, the elimination of those nasty SAG employees, those players strutting and fretting upon the little screen and cobbling together a living in the process.

  Wilkinson wanted Maiser’s job and, given Maiser’s rather public domestic problems of late, he probably had a good shot at it. Wanted it last year, wanted it this year, wants it ever more fervently at the base of the wall out behind La Casa Grande. About the only good thing Jeffrey Maiser can say about Wilkinson is that he has a withered thumb. Maiser doesn’t know the cause of this deformity, what peculiarity of genetic material brought about the thumb, which resembles the little penile nub of a newborn. There is no way that thing is opposable. Wilkinson is forever clapping you on the shoulder with the left hand, so that you get a close-up look at the nubbin, whereupon his face will fall in some expression of beleaguered self-consciousness. In these moments, it is
hard not to feel compassion for Len Wilkinson.

  Oh yeah, the fifth member of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, here at the wall, is none other than Lorna Quinson, who is wearing an attractively modest dress from the Lands’ End catalogue. She tugs at Maiser’s shirt. “I think I’m woefully overdressed, Jeffrey,” she says, gesturing at the outfit, in which her socks match the deep blue of the dress.

  The management consultant expert interrupts his spiel in mid-enthusiasm. “Listen up, ladies and gentlemen. You are going to have to pay closer attention if you want to actively pursue the goal of excellence here this morning. You are being timed against your subordinates. Everyone’s being timed here today, and there will be tremendous prizes, not to mention bragging rights, for whichever team brings in the best time.”

  “It’d make a good midseason replacement program, Jeff, don’t you think?” Wilkinson crows. “Management Olympians or something like that. Where Fortune 500 CEOs and their subordinates compete for the reins of their corporations? Tuesday night, maybe, right after the soft news.”

  Still, it’s obvious Wilkinson is a little nervous. He’s shifting from foot to foot as though he’s got some kind of prostate infection and he’s jiggling change in his pocket. And Stew Ledbetter is sopping his face with a brightly colored handkerchief. Leslie Aaronson is reapplying her lipstick.

  “Team building,” the management consultant continues, “working in concert, working together as one, finding commonalities, synergies. You’ll have to decide who goes over the wall first and who helps the others up from the top, and you’ll have to decide who waits at the top while the rope is being used on the far side, because the wall is eighteen feet, and there’s only the one rope.”

  Suddenly it’s as if the consultant is looking right at Wilkinson’s deformity, the thumb. It’s as if Naz Korngold has assembled this crew of misfits precisely to put the colossal hurt on Jeff Maiser. And Maiser, who is a three-times-a-week-at-the-gym kind of guy, sees the way it is going. He sees that he is outdoors in the ninety-degree heat with an alcoholic, a mall doll in leather pants and high heels, an embalmer, and a guy with no opposable thumb.

  “Okay,” the consultant guy says. “You have five minutes to prepare.”

  An interval of reflection settles over the participants. They’re looking at one another with unalloyed contempt. Each one, the way Maiser sees it, is thinking that he or she is the one surrounded by deadwood. Each is jockeying for position. Each is closing in for the kill. Each is thinking, I have to make do with this? This is the best management team at the best multinational entertainment and coffin provider in the world? This is it?

  “Stew,” Jeff ventures. “How you feeling? Feeling like maybe you want to go up first?”

  “Never better, Jeff,” Stew says. “I’m feeling nothing that a nap and a couple of those migraine pills wouldn’t cure. But I’m ready to go; I’m ready to contribute. In fact, I want to contribute.”

  “How were you in the chin-up department? You good for five or ten chin-ups back in your day?”

  “I got the draft deferment, Jeff, if that’s what you mean. I went back to business school. And I can’t say that I have done a lot of chin-ups since that time. But I’m willing to try.”

  Leslie chimes in. “Look, I think I should just go over really fast, because I can do it expeditiously, and that will bring us that much closer to winning. My husband is a trainer.”

  “Leslie,” Jeff says, “you might as well just take off the heels right now, and maybe the leather pants, too. Don’t you think the pants are a little too constricting for this exercise? We don’t need you to lap dance here, we need you to scale a wall. Personally, I’m happy to avert my eyes.”

  “I bet you are, Jeffrey.”

  “Have it your way, girl.”

  Lorna stays out of the infighting. Modestly, she removes her flats and her navy blue socks, modestly she sets these aside, under the partial shade of a yucca, along with her sweater and a pair of bracelets. Forty-five seconds, thirty seconds, fifteen seconds. Lorna has this humility about the demands of the wall, an almost philosophical humility. Must be the mortuary business. Must be the way she has made her money. She has some of the serene efficiency of the mortician. And then it hits Jeffrey Maiser, at once, who Lorna reminds him of. And it’s not in any obvious way at all, but that doesn’t make him less of a moron. It’s in some throwaway gesture, an offhanded refixing of a stray hair. She reminds him of the thing that he lost, the person he lost so completely when he embarked on the madness of Lacey. He lost the grace of women his own age, the way they survive. Those were the few quiet years in his life, the years when his marriage was good. Those were the years when the yammering in his skull was quieter, and those years are gone, and there’s no one to blame but himself. When the management consultant calls time, this is what Maiser is thinking, that he misses his wife.

  Lorna’s hand around his wrist calls him forth from the past, because Len Wilkinson has thrown Leslie Aaronson aside, in a pretty rough way, so that she has fallen to the ground beside the rope, twisting her ankle. The two of them, Lorna and Jeffrey, watch in an almost ecstatic paralysis as Wilkinson, with only the one hand, attempts to fling himself up the wall in such a way that the potential for severe back injury is unignorable.

  “Jeffrey,” Lorna says, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night. And I know this really isn’t the right time to bring it up. But I just thought I’d let you know. About the programming issue. I’m not really the most terrific sleeper, and last night, instead of writing my essay, I made a list of television programs I’ve liked over the years —”

  Wilkinson is grunting with the exertion, and Stew Ledbetter is pushing against his ass, trying to help but in a sort of halfhearted way, as though he wishes the whole thing would end.

  “You son of a bitch, Len! You think I’m going to let you work on The Green Lantern publicity with me this summer? No fucking way!” says Leslie, massaging her ankle. She castigates the consultant guy, too. “I hope you’re taking notes or something.”

  “— It’s the miniseries, Jeff. Gosh, I know, it’s just the most old-fashioned thing imaginable right now. That sort of thing is banished to cable television or something, and no one watches them, or that’s the theory. But what I like is a big multigenerational story, Jeff, with a lot of characters, and I like the big themes—love, death, war, adultery—and I like a sense that there is order in the universe, that we’re not all out here clawing our way to the top for no reason. So that’s what I’d say. I’d watch Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds any day, and that little girl who later becomes his wife, just adorable. What a pretty landscape!”

  Maiser says, “You know, it’s really funny you’d say that, because I was in the hotel the other day and I got this call —”

  There’s no time. He could stand and talk to Lorna for hours, but there’s no time. Somebody has to stop Wilkinson, who is hanging by one hand from the rope, about four feet up, and is calling out for help. Before Maiser knows it, he is running, and he can feel himself running, can feel the decision being made in the quads and the delts, and it’s not some corporate type of decision, it’s a reflexive decision, as if he is a character in a miniseries himself, and before you can say enhanced revenue stream, he has Wilkinson around the waist and is lowering him back to the floor of the desert, after which, with a dexterity he doesn’t think he still possesses, he has his own boozy body halfway up and a hand over the top, where he scrapes off a couple of layers of skin. The shadows are all on the other side of the wall. If only they had known that the shadows are there, and that all they have to do is drop over the other end and they will be in the shade, where a cooler full of bottled water awaits.

  “Leslie,” he calls, upon lofting a leg over the summit so that he can sit. “Get your ass up here. And forget about retaining counsel. You can sue over your sprained ankle tomorrow. Today, you’re getting your ass up here. Get on it, sweetie. Now.”

  And the
amazing thing is that Leslie has taken off the leather pants. Admittedly, she’s wearing a long silk shirt, but she has done what needs to be done, and he has to admit, her body is a traffic-stopping kind of a thing. Never let it be said that those young women who spend all their time in the gym are not strong, because they are incredibly strong, because she’s halfway up in the time it would take to have a station break and she’s got a spiel going the whole time: “Do you want me to stay at the top and help to lift Stew up? Or do you want me to go over the other side? Just tell me the plan!”

  “Go over,” he says, and by the time he says it, she’s already there, flipping the rope as if it were some trick she learned as a cheerleader in high school, when she wasn’t snorting coke and copying other people’s essays. He gets a quick look at her backside, notes that that is definitely not a thong, and then she’s over the edge. Leslie swings hard against the other side, halfway down, and lets go, landing like a Romanian gymnast, except that she shouts, “Motherfucker!” About the ankle.