The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  “Stew!” Jeff calls.

  Ledbetter is standing at the bottom of the rope as it pendulums in front of him. “Jeff, I don’t know. Maybe I was being a little ambitious before!”

  “Stew,” he says, “we just don’t have time, pal; we just don’t have time. Want your division to get spun off?”

  And that’s the thing that does it, and Stew Ledbetter is up, huffing and puffing until he’s near the top.

  “Jeff, I’m worried I’m going to vomit. I’m just really not that good with heights.”

  But in fact Stew is coming up, with much grimacing, and soon he has one flabby hand grabbing at the top.

  “Leslie, get ready down there, he’s coming down!”

  Maiser hoists up the rope. And Stew tips over the top as though he’s falling into his grave. There’s an ominous thud. But Jeff doesn’t look because he can see that Len Wilkinson is at the bottom of the wall now, awaiting his turn. He hears Leslie call that she has Stew and that Stew is indeed throwing up, but there’s no time, no time.

  “Len, get the hell out of the way; we’re doing Lorna next.”

  “But Jeff, I can help pull Lorna up.”

  “You could, Len, but you’re not going to. Get out of the way.”

  Wilkinson seems to have no intention of doing that, however, until Lorna kicks him hard in the shin. With her bare foot. It’s a gutsy move. Wilkinson crumples, bent over his hematoma. And now comes the difficult part, which is where Jeffrey leans down to pull, because Lorna is just not going to have lifted herself up any ropes lately. To his amazement, though, she seems to have choreographed rope stylings, as if there was some past of rope training or something, or maybe water ballet, one of those grace-filled girlhood activities.

  “Lorna, are you going to need —”

  “I was a gymnast as a kid. Until I had a fall.”

  “A fall? Was it a back injury of some kind?”

  “If you could just give me a hand at the top, please.”

  She has the rope fed between her bare feet, which feature painted toenails, and she contorts herself, like an inchworm on a blade of grass, with each fresh upward convulsion, until her hand reaches for his, and their hands are connected, and he pulls her up. He can see her bra strap. And her bra strap is good. And her hair has come unfastened. And her hair is good. The fact of her past upon the balance beam is good. Flushed cheeks. Heaving bosom. The gleam, in her green eyes, of exertion. And the two of them are on the top of the wall, and on the one side, they are watching Leslie and Stew drinking bottled water in the shade. And on the other, in the glare of the desert sun, Len Wilkinson.

  “I guess the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t cover this one, Len,” Jeff says. Lorna makes no move to go down the far side yet, and her dress billows under her from the other side of the wall.

  “Are you going to make fun of my disability, Jeffrey? That doesn’t seem like team building.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your disability. I have better things to worry about than your little baby penis. Len, listen, I can’t help but notice the view from up here. It’s a sensational view. Clear day, bright sunshine. The view is just great.”

  “What do you mean?” Tugging on the end of the rope as if he’s going to attempt to go it alone again.

  “What I mean, Len, is that it seems to me that we have the opportunity to make a deal. That’s the view I’m seeing from up here, Len. I’m seeing a view of corporate structure before me. Or maybe that’s not really the thing, Len; maybe it’s not corporate structure that I mean. Maybe what I’m seeing is an idea of corporate ethics, of the way things might work, and maybe that’s what team building is all about, all pulling in the same direction in terms of ethics, Len, right? The scales have fallen from my eyes up here, Len, and suddenly I’m feeling really good about things —”

  “Gentlemen,” the management consultant guy suddenly intrudes in the action, “I remind you that you’re being timed, and lengthy conversations are really going to eat up a lot of time.”

  “Fuck off, pal. Now, Len, here’s the deal. I like my job and I like having the kind of responsibility that I have, because I think I’m good at it, and I like the other people in my division, the people I’ve worked with for the last twenty or twenty-five years in some cases, and I don’t want to see anything happen to my division. I mean, I’m willing to make a few changes to swing with the fashions of the moment, but I’m not willing to see a fifty-year tradition of news broadcasting taken over by a few punks with too much gel in their hair, and what I’m looking for, in general, are some assurances that my division is going to survive the next shake-up, and this is where I think you can be of some use to me.”

  “Jesus, Jeff, we’re —”

  “We’re going to be announcing some bold new programming in the next couple of weeks, Len, and these new programs are going to be anything but the enhanced-reality model. What I’m wanting from you is that you are going to come up with the ideas we need to launch these new programs. You’re going to use your skills, you’re going to promote the hell out of this sonofabitch, and you’re going to stake your reputation on it.”

  “Jeff, what are we talking about?”

  “I got one word, Len, one word for you. And that word is miniseries.”

  “Jeff, let’s just get this over with.”

  At which Jeffrey Maiser turns to his helpmeet, the embalmer, and tells her to hold his feet, he’s going down.

  20

  Eduardo Alcott has sequestered Tyrone in the basement, where they are hunkered on a couch with vinyl protective covering. There are many power tools nearby, and serpentine coils of extension cords. And there is the smell of sawdust. The forlornness of basements is well-known. Alcott has made sure that Tyrone’s brother, a.k.a. the Great White Hope, is no longer acting as his brother’s keeper. The tutelage and indoctrination must be undertaken in a precinct free from interference. The process must be given space and time, as with Chinese reeducation. This, at any rate, is how Tyrone explains the situation to himself.

  Today’s lecture, according to Eduardo, is about the perforation of the skull. The theme of today’s lecture is the communication between the contents of the interior of the skull and the environment. The theme of today’s lecture is the urgent need of these two regions to communicate more freely. The theme of today’s lecture is blood-to-brain-tissue ratios and the fluidity of blood. The theme of today’s lecture is the mystical surgery known as trepanation, the boring, scraping, drilling, or cutting of the skull, using such tools as have been explored from Neolithic times up to present times: the cylindrical crown saw, the Woodall trephine, and the cone-shaped cylinder with center pin.

  Eduardo, the Mexican ideologue, a fiery and passionate man, claims distant ancestry to the founder of a local collectivist experiment in Utopian thinking, in the following way: the initial Alcott, the Utopian Alcott, for all of his theoretical expertise, got with child a young woman of the Indies who was in his employ, and this unwanted young woman was exiled to the tropical latitudes of her girlhood, where, after prolonged and grueling labor, she whelped a boy, whom she called Alcott after his father, and this Alcott grew up scorned and hated. The lot of bastardy is hard. Nevertheless, this young Alcott, by the name of Neville, was proud and strong. He read widely in the writings of his father and his father’s friends, for example, a certain Walden Pond camping expert. And Neville learned of the immensity of nature, the perfection of nature, and of the pestilence of man. He likewise learned, by virtue of his coming of age in the tropics, of the many religious and mystical practices favored by the so-called savage cultures, among these being cannibalism, incest, sacrifice, ritual amputation, dowsing, and the like. Neville Alcott retired to a cave on a lone island in the Caribbean Sea, taking only his wife, who was a dark woman, a Moorish woman, a former slave or perhaps the daughter of slaves, and together they produced a great line of Alcotts, a coffee-hued line of Alcotts, and these Alcotts rose up in the Caribbean Isles. They were a
s one with the freed slaves, the abandoned slaves. They were as one with workers of the sugarcane plantations, they brewed rum in the hot sun, they lived in palm-frond shacks when hurricanes blew, and when they had become as strong as an army, these Alcotts were a part of every attempt to overthrow the European oppressor in this hemisphere. The Alcotts rode into Havana in tanks with Fidel, Eduardo said. In fact, Eduardo himself rode into Managua with Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, and he composed position papers for the Zapatistas, and he abducted villagers with the Shining Path. In every place where the Alcotts could oppose the power of the Anglo and his lackeys, the Alcotts shone forth, until, through the magic of counternarrative and alternative historical systems, as explained by Gramsci and Fanon, this Alcott came back to the place where the original Utopian Alcott once lived himself, to Concord, Massachusetts, where the Revolution of your pestilential country began, and here he intends to begin the process of bringing down the fiendish American power, bringing it to its knees, so that America can know how it subjects the many peoples of the world to its bad television programs, its repellent and decadent movies, its fascistic foreign policy, and also its inferior mass productions of cut-rate goods, such as bad beer and coffee and cars that are the laughingstock of the globe.

  Today’s lecture is about the operation “for the removal of stone,” whose history was first articulated by one Paul Broca, a French gentleman who was given a skull by an American prison reformer named Squier, who in turn got this skull as a gift from a Peruvian woman. The skull, sundered from its identity, made the rounds and was for a time much studied by a phrenologist with unusually large ears, called Horsly. Why was this skull so valuable? Every age has its abundance of skulls. The Khmer Rouge, e.g., paved roads with skulls. The skulls in Rwanda outnumber the bowls. The skull in question was of interest because it had a perfect parallelogram cut from its surface by pre-Columbian Peruvians, Peruvians before the pestilence of Columbus and Cortés and their rapacious hordes. This skull had a parallelogram cut out of it, after which the owner of the skull apparently survived for a time. Because, if you believe the writings of Paul Broca, there is evidence of some of the bone growing back.

  “There are thousands of these skulls found in the area of Peru,” Alcott says, droning on in his interminable way, licking his lips, running his hands through his wavy gray locks, refixing the aviator glasses to his nose. “Peru is the capital of this historical surgery, the surgery known as trepanation. Peru and surrounding areas, and this is what we wish for you to understand, comrade. From here the operation was exported around the globe. From Neolithic times, from the times which are before writing and history, you find the Peruvians boring holes in the skull. And soon thereafter you find peoples in the Pacific Islands also performing this operation, having in all likelihood learned this operation from the Peruvians, and this we know because of the revolutionary peoples of New Caledonia, where trepanations were as common as the extraction of teeth. And this is the case even in New Ireland, where women frequently carved the skulls of their own children so as to make sure their children would grow up tall. It is possible, of course, that peoples made these journeys by canoe, from the coast of Latin America to the islands, because of prevailing winds. The word kumara, for example, denoting a kind of sweet potato, this also made a transpacific journey, according to linguists, and just so with the operation for the removal of stone.

  “Many times”— Eduardo pauses to increase the mystery —“many times, these operations were for legitimate purposes, maybe depressed skull fractures, you know, when a piece of bone is actually driven into the tissues of the brain and surgery is in order to remove the bone fragments and to drain out the pus. As you are aware, my revolutionary brother, there is also the operation that is about the humors, about allowing the bad air to be released, the bad air of humors. The trepan was used to release this bad air into the room, after which the healing would begin to take place, because when there is pressure upon the brain or when the blood in the brain begins to coagulate, according to valid and historically sound medical theory, there is illness and death.

  “But many other times, the operations took place in order to release demons who were harassing the medical subjects. Or the operations took place for spiritual purposes. For example, in Eastern Europe, which is the last place this type of surgery reached because this was the most backward place on the globe, you have the Bronze Age Russians, who were really just isolated bands of tribes in the region of the Minussinsk Basin or the Dnepr River. Still, using various scraping tools, they too performed trepanations, after which these tribesmen carried harvested pieces of the skull around with them as amulets. In some cases, you know, we’ve even read of buried remains of tribesmen, in bogs, carrying sacks with them in which there were contained bits and pieces of numerous skulls, all of these fragments removed from living persons. It is to be supposed, my revolutionary brother, that the magic was increased if the piece of skull that was obtained was from a living person.

  “Left parietal lobe, almost always the proper region for the trepanning in these Bronze Age times, in Italy, Austria, Portugal, for example. There the skulls were beveled.”

  The basement is damp and cold. The furnace is shuddering as if desperate, just a few feet from where Tyrone is sitting. One of Eduardo’s flunkies, a high school kid named Hal, has gone off for more food, returning with hummus and tabbouleh bought in large tubs from the local health food market. Eduardo is very passionate about the health food market. Eduardo is passionate about many things, unless perhaps this is just part of the indoctrination process.

  It happened this way: Tyrone and the Great White Hope had jogged up the street, under cover of night, fleeing the residence of Tyrone’s adoptive parents. It seems so long ago. They fled, and there was a brief moment, in the air of autumn, when Tyrone’s liberty seemed grand, like he was a dove released. Then there was some waiting, and shivering, underneath an oak, in the shadows, until an unassuming Econoline van appeared, a van featuring the sort of unsettled idle that is an augury of future muffler trouble, and before he could think twice about it, Tyrone was jumped, blanketed with some rough wool, bundled into the back of the Econoline, which unfortunately did not have the all-purpose Sears love mattress, and then Tyrone, who did not struggle, was blindfolded. Tyrone was told not to ask questions. Tyrone was told that if he cooperated there would be no need for force.

  The Great White Hope had appeared to be just returning from some after-school activity, basketball practice or whatever it was he did, oboe lessons. The Great White Hope appeared, notwithstanding excessive bodily ornament, to have his middle-class white-boy routine down pretty good. But appearances deceive. Because the Great White Hope was attempting to shake off the chains of his elite birth; he was attempting to be with the people, alongside his pals, these revolutionary types, who favored the rhetoric of high-powered cranial saws. You held the saw in place with your forehead while you winched the boring mechanism into the head of the sufferer, who was bleeding like a stuck pig.

  At first, Tyrone believed that the Great White Hope had given him up to the authorities. But of course he couldn’t figure out why he needed to be blindfolded in order to be extradited back to the Empire State. Tyrone’s revolutionary spirit was clouded at this time. He had a feeling of loneliness, and he believed that the Great White Hope needed to turn him over, perhaps to claim some reward, or to get his photo in mass-marketed periodicals, or simply to indicate his supremacy over his darker adopted brother. Tyrone’s feeling was sorrow, but sorrow is for the weak. In years past, Tyrone had attempted to instruct the Great White Hope. In fact, this was an area of some nostalgia. Tyrone wanted to be certain that the Great White Hope got beyond the standard-issue education of the rich suburban kid. Maybe Tyrone’s kidnapping, in a van that smelled of spoiled milk, was proof enough that the Great White Hope had now come into his own. There was the silence of the van, and then there was incense burning, sandalwood, to cover up the dope smoking and the spoiled mil
k. Tyrone began to relax, to feel that a condition of permanent flight was paradoxically useful to his legal situation. If he had no idea where he was going, it could hardly be bad for him.

  Three or four persons hustled him into a little shack apparently somewhere in the northeastern suburbs. They led him stumbling into a cheap living room, which was done up in the cut-rate paneling that indicated the permanent vegetative state of National Football League enthusiasts. This he knew when the Great White Hope removed the blindfold.

  “Sorry, bro. Hope it wasn’t too uncomfortable.”

  Tyrone said nothing. Nothing had served him well before. The revolutionaries stared at Tyrone, blinking, as if he astonished them. He noticed that the table was cluttered with ceramic ashtrays of the sort made by fumbling elementary school students. Whoever acted as leader, and it became obvious quickly that the leader was this Mexican man with wild hair and fervent, unblinking eyes, had a school bus full of sixth graders on his payroll. Further evidence of this was to be found in the knit pot holders in the kitchen, where the revolutionaries all ate together. One of the four teenagers standing by offered Tyrone a beverage: Gatorade, the popular sports drink, complete with electrolytes. No telephone anywhere to be found, and a television with only a coat hanger for an antenna. For a time, they all said nothing. Later, the comrades played cards in silence.

  After some hours, it came out that the Great White Hope needed to return to the home of his parents. They needed to come up with a story for him to provide these genetic parents. Eduardo silenced the deliberations, motioned to Tyrone to stand up, and took him down into the basement, where, in his stiff, academic English, he began the first of his study sessions on the theory and practice of the organization known as the Retrievalists. Tyrone said the syllables over and over, as if the repetition would give some clear evidence of hidden meaning. The Retrievalists. The first lesson concerned the bogus history of the Alcotts, described above, and when it was over, a wordless teenage girl stretched out a down sleeping bag for Tyrone on the basement floor. The Retrievalists would have him sleep there.