The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  He took the L rods from the small kit bag he’d brought, an old messenger’s bag with the name of a local newspaper fading from its side. And he presented the L rods and the grips to Max in his brusque way.

  “You try.”

  While Max was getting used to the feel of the grips, Eduardo was giving him the second lesson. The second lesson was as follows: It is not in the material of the divining rod that the divination resides but in the dowser himself. Didn’t matter what you used, Eduardo said, and the excessive attention that some people paid to the Y rod and its perfect varnish was fetishistic and against the spirit of dowsing. Some people used fishing weights on fishing line and they held aloft this little pendulum item and they waited for it to arc back and forth. Some people, Eduardo said, used their hands alone. They went into the woods with their hands aloft, in a receptive state, and they waited until they felt their palms get moist or they waited for the hairs to stand up on their arms, at which point they knew they were in the presence of silver or gold or other eternal mysteries.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Ask it.”

  “Ask it what?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Is there water?”

  “Be more specific.”

  So Max asked, on that chilly day in April, if there was a spring nearby where they could refill their canteens. And immediately the L rods opened in what Eduardo described as the “yes” position, the V position, and Max wondered, even as it was happening, if he was causing this to happen, the way impatient teens gathered around a Ouija board will always immediately summon the dead kid from up the block. Was Max tilting the rods down because he wanted to pass this examination so that Eduardo would quit looking at him that way? Still, the L rods had given the answer he was looking for. There was a spring. Eduardo laid a gloved hand on his shoulder.

  “Now ask in which direction.”

  He asked the L rods in which direction the water lay, which felt really stupid because it was like talking to his hiking boots or something. Immediately, the L rods crossed, and he found that the direction was not straight ahead, and not to his left, but exactly in the direction of magnetic north that Eduardo had indicated before. Max walked carefully forward, with Eduardo following behind, and the forest closed around them as if the divining rods were in collusion with the wisdom of the primeval forest. When the rods gave an ambiguous message about how to proceed, he waited, turned slightly, until he felt that tug, as if he had caught a fish on the end of them, and he hurried forward anew. Before long they heard voices, and then they saw other hikers in their brightly colored jackets, filling their water bottles from a pipe that protruded from igneous rock. They drank.

  Eduardo congratulated him, and the two of them began to walk back, Indian file, the way they had come, toward the van. It was as they walked that Eduardo told him that the halos of the saints were not halos but auras, this was well-known, and that the divining rods could measure the auras of all persons, and that before they went back to Newton, Eduardo was bound, by his belief in the sanctity of the revolution, to ensure that Max’s intentions were honorable, through the measurement and calibration of his aura. So, Eduardo asked, would Max please stop where he was at the moment? Would he please stand completely still?

  It crossed Max’s mind that he was about to be executed, that he was standing in the traditional posture of executions, like in WWII movies where victims turned their backs and laced their hands behind their heads. Hard to tell with Eduardo whether he trusted you or was about to put a bullet in you. Still, maybe the one thing Max did believe in was belief, and maybe it wasn’t the kind of belief that his father, the Reverend Duffy, believed in. He felt as though he wanted to believe in something, some great system, and that the opportunities for this kind of belief were few, because the only thing that you could believe in these days was an acne cream that contained enough fast-acting agents to clear up your blemish before the big dance. Or maybe you believed that if you went ahead and busted your ass on some standardized test and didn’t just fill in little circles in the shape of a bunny, you would get a chance to go to some school that would make sure you learned about business administration, so that, later on, working on behalf of a very large corporation, you could, with a straight face, say the words, “The public was never in danger at any time.”

  Max believed that Eduardo believed in something, and he therefore hoped he would not be shot. So, in the stillness of the forest, when Eduardo said, “Tell me, does this man have the true heart of a revolutionary?” he thought that it would probably be okay, and that he would not fail the test. When he was invited to turn and face the Y rod and its assessment of his character, he was happy to find that the device was pointed down. It was in the “yes” position—because he did have the heart of the believer.

  Was that at Monadnock? Or was that the first time they’d come here, to the pond? And was it with the Y rod, as he remembers, or did Eduardo do the test with his hands? As if he were in the process of bestowing some Andean blessing? Max wasn’t sure, because it was the spring, the time of gorging himself on the orthodoxy of the Retrievalists, a dizzy time with a flood of ideologies, and as he tramps through the woods now, around the pond, with the commuters whizzing past on their way home to cocktails, he thinks about how the price of enlightenment was that he needed to hide a lot of things from his parents.

  Eduardo’s third lesson concerned ley lines, or lines of power, which “came from above,” Eduardo said, though he never elaborated on the nature of this above. Maybe it was a cosmic thing, you know, or maybe it was a religious thing. Whichever it was, you could dowse these lines of power with your dowsing rod. Just as you could dowse the water supply. And what you would find was that spiritual places, houses of worship or other alternative systems of knowledge and understanding, inevitably cropped up along these lines of power. Like you might find that there was a shaman living here, or you might find that an old church was on one of the lines of power, which made Max want to dowse the First Congregational Church to see if the church where his father practiced was a true place of spirit. At the same time, he sort of didn’t want to find out that his dad was a huckster.

  The third lesson definitely took place here by the pond, because Eduardo had gone running like a madman into these woods, looking for the approximate site at which a certain environmentalist and revolutionary, always referred to as the “civil disobedient,” had once resided. Here beside the pond. Eduardo claimed that the “civil disobedient” had lived along a ley line and Eduardo claimed that it was possible to prove this. If you took a map of the countryside and you dangled a pendulum above this map, you might draw a line, Eduardo said, that ran right from the spot where the “civil disobedient” had once lived. The “civil disobedient,” H. D. Thoreau, Eduardo observed, knew that American civilization was about corruption. He knew that the laws of American civilization were corrupt; and he came to this place because this was where the energy originated. Eduardo, with the Y rod dipping in front of him, dashed madly into the undergrowth, to where the “civil disobedient” was granted his vision, a diviner’s vision, Eduardo said. The “civil disobedient” came here with nothing, with pittances of cash and meager possessions, and he came to make his union with the energy of this place. The union was good, because the “civil disobedient” never again wrote anything as flawless as what he wrote here. He never wrote anything flawless about the Maine woods and he seemed to have paddled the whole length of the Merrimack without crossing a single line of power.

  The pond doesn’t seem so magnificent now, as Max bushwhacks through the skunk cabbage. Night is falling, and it’s starting to drizzle. And his mother is calling to him, “Honey! Where are you? Don’t go too far, okay?” But there’s always a good reason to go farther into the woods. They’re going to chop down the woods and put in a bunch of condominiums, lakefront properties, it’s already decided, with a boat landing for the Jet Ski guys. And something weird happens to Max just as he has this t
hought about the Jet Ski guys. He remembers something Eduardo said. Maybe it was the fourth lesson, and maybe the fourth lesson was mumbled one day when they were here by the pond, offhandedly, and the fourth lesson was that, Eduardo said, “If they ever come for me, look here, and I’ll leave a message.”

  Max didn’t give it much credence back then. He never paid much attention to Eduardo’s more apocalyptic observations. Still, he’s doing what he never thought he’d do; he’s pulling down a live branch from a maple sapling, and he’s pulling off stray bits of bark, exposing, in the process, some of the green pulp underneath, and why? Because he thinks he’ll give it one more try. He’ll make a satisfying wishbone of a twig. He doesn’t want his mom to see what he’s up to, and he doesn’t know why. The pursuit of magic is like masturbation or sentimentality; it’s best done alone. When he has a hurriedly constructed Y rod, he does what he was taught. He puts the bifurcated section between the third and fourth fingers of his upturned hands, with the point facing upward, and he asks the Y rod the question he has for it today, and that question is: “Did Eduardo leave a message here for me?”

  The important thing is to empty your mind. The distractions are the encroachments of the commuters, the possibility of Jet Ski guys in their pastel-striped wet suits, the distractions of home. His mother, and his father, and his brother. Tune out his brother’s legal situation, his sister is coming up from New York. Oh yeah, and where is he going to go to college? “Adherence to truth is the cornerstone of dowsing,” Eduardo told him, and the truth is what he is after. He waits for the Y rod of antiquity to dip. He waits for it to struggle with him. He waits for it to confer on him the honor of a reply. He waits to be made more than he is, more than the kid who is grounded and who has to take the trash out and do all the laundry for everyone in the house, not failing to remove the delicates before putting the bundle in the dryer. He waits. The Y rod does not disappoint.

  The Y rod says “yes.” The Y rod thrusts its prow toward the fecund earth. With uncanny self-sufficiency. He asks if the message lies ahead of him, and the Y rod continues to say “yes.” He follows the “yes” farther into the woods, “yes” past the little forest of silver birches, “yes” past a guy who is letting his springer spaniel run free, “yes” past the remains of a party from last weekend, a campfire circle and a couple of empty six-packs, “yes” farther into the forest, “yes” unto the moment the tip of the Y rod unaccountably rises up again.

  “Is this the place where Eduardo left a message for me?”

  The Y rod indicates “yes.” As if it’s trying to wrest control of itself away from him.

  He flings the stick to the ground, and he gets down on his hands and his knees, in the drizzle, until his knees are covered with mud, pushing aside leaves and pushing against downed limbs and rocks, looking for he doesn’t know what. Until he finds it at last, when he’s covered with the topdressing of the forest floor, when his vintage windbreaker is dotted with decomposing leaves, when his jeans are soaked all the way through. Only then has he found the tree stump, on the ley line of the “civil disobedient,” where Eduardo has left the note for him. Folded into halves, these sheets of legal paper, shoved into a crevice in the stump. He sits beside the Y rod on the forest floor, so that now his ass is wet, too. In the dwindling light, he attempts to interpret the ink-smeared lines on the pages.

  Dear Maximillian,

  If you’re reading this it means that I’m probably in custody or have left town. If so, I apologize for leaving you all in the way that I have done. And that’s not the only thing I have to apologize for, but I’ll start there. And I’m sorry for bringing you all this way, out into the woods, just to tell you what you probably already know, that I’m gone.

  I guess I should tell you that my name isn’t Eduardo Alcott, although maybe you’ve guessed this part already. Actually, my name is Sy Molina. Though I was raised in Rhode Island, my mother is from Guatemala, so I am Central American along the maternal line. I was educated at the University of Rhode Island in social work, and most of my life I have been a child welfare caseworker for social services in Massachusetts.

  For a few years, I thought my job was honorable, if difficult. It was what I’d been trained to do. But after a while I started to feel like my place of employment was the one place not to be if you really cared about kids. Because I was seeing all these kids who were breaking my heart. I was seeing all these kids who were left out in the cold by the system, getting shunted around from house to house, mostly to places where the adults were being paid to shelter them, and these adults didn’t care at all.

  I had hundreds of kids in my caseload, and I couldn’t remember the names or the details of most of their stories. I began feeling like I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t make a difference. In fact, when there was a problem, sometimes it seemed like it was just a hassle to correct it. I felt this burden, like I knew I was going to have to deal with all this paperwork and bring action against some of the foster parents, and the kids had already been beaten or their parents had left them or the parents were addicts, whatever it was. I just couldn’t live with the fact that I brought these kids more trouble instead of less. I had tried to help them out, and often I placed them in these homes where they were even worse off.

  This was my job for twenty years. I’d read the case reports at night. I couldn’t tell which kid was Evan or Juanita or Lance. Had I gotten this kid out of South Boston or Dorchester or Worcester? I didn’t know, but I’d put him with some couple that already had four foster kids, and they had more spaces now because the last one had gone into the juvenile-detention system after assaulting his science teacher.

  Everyone burns out eventually. One day, I chewed out my manager, told her that she was responsible for the trouble that all my kids were going to get into. We were making it worse for them, I told her, and I said this to her in front of a bunch of other caseworkers. I told my manager that the work we were doing was worthless, and after I left there that night, I didn’t get out of bed for almost six months. At the end of that period, I was living in the house and in the circumstances in which you came to know me.

  I met this heavy metal kid in the mall by the interstate, and I was talking to him in the food court about what kinds of bands interested him, that kind of thing. I remember I was reading a book about the Black Panthers that I’d bought in a used-book store. Glenn seemed like he was impressed with anything having to do with the Black Panthers, and I have to admit his approval made me feel good. That was the very moment when Eduardo was born, out of thin air. It was a big relief for Sy Molina. Because Sy Molina had lived for his work, but he had also failed at his work, and his relationships hadn’t turned out too well, and he was making do in a dump of a rental in the commercial part of town, and he was reduced to talking to kids at the mall. No one else would talk to him.

  Glenn wasn’t like other teens. Glenn felt like Eduardo was someone he could look up to. And this was the first time, in all the years that it had been my job to look after young people, that I felt like I was really interacting with kids, really having an impact. Back when I worked with child welfare, I would look in on a kid and I’d tell him, You aren’t using drugs, are you? Because you really shouldn’t use drugs. And then I’d go back to my house and smoke reefers, like I’d been doing since the seventies, and meanwhile the kid was probably sniffing glue and he wasn’t paying any attention to anything I was saying. Why should he? Glenn didn’t feel like I was an asshole, and when I was Eduardo, with Glenn, I had this sudden need to teach him things, to learn the kinds of things myself that I could pass on to Glenn, in the process proving to him what a special kid he was, how brilliant, how full of energy. It didn’t make any difference if he was using drugs. Eduardo’s attitude was that if Glenn was using drugs then maybe he was learning something about himself and something about his identity.

  When Glenn brought Nina around, that was a big bonus, because it was like my caseload had expanded. I was starting to merit the
kind of responsibility that I’d had when I was working for the state. Nina was sensitive. I could really learn some things, some crazy things, alternative philosophies, and I could tell Nina about these things, and she would really listen and her eyes would get wide. All the things that seem so impossible in the world, like genuine change, you could tell Nina about these things, and she would just eat them up. Maybe I did fall a little bit in love with Nina, I’m not sure. I know I never laid a glove on her, never even hugged her, but I know I wanted to impress her.

  What do a bunch of teenagers get from listening to teachers at school, where the curriculum is about the same old shit in the same old way, making sure that you fit into the mold that society wants you to fit into? That wasn’t going to work for you guys, because you were special, and I just wanted for you what nobody else wanted for you. I loved all the crazy things about you, your ideals, and I guess I created ideals for you to love even more. The fact that you guys wanted to come over to my place and hang out with me, that made me feel like I could do better, and go further, for each of you. Like I was the parent who really loved who you were, instead of wanting you to be a certain kind of person so that you were easy to love.

  I designed everyone’s training along these lines. I designed stuff so that people could improve at being who they were. I designed stuff that would build on your confidence, make you feel better when you left my house. So you could go to school and you could mess with some football player if you had to. You could walk around with head held high. Each of you had secrets, and they were good secrets. Bits of wisdom.

  But the more I lived out the lies of Eduardo, the worse things got. I began feeling paranoid everywhere. I would walk out on the street, and I would think that people were going to find out. I would think that people were going to call me Sy. I worried I’d run into some guy from social services when I was out with one of you. I started wearing glasses and I grew a beard and everything, just so that people wouldn’t recognize me, and maybe this way I’d bury Sy Molina for good.