The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  You’ve probably figured out that I don’t know anything about dowsing. I think dowsing is very interesting but I don’t know anything about it. That time up in the woods, well, I knew where magnetic north was before I dowsed, because I had a compass with me. And as for your finding the spring, I had my hand on your shoulder. I was trying to steer you in the right direction.

  Things changed when you showed up, Max. First of all, you’re a brilliant guy, and I expect you’ll go to Harvard to learn about liberation theology, or whatever it is they teach there now, and you’re going to make a difference in this world, and if your parents have been too busy lately to remind you how brilliant you are, then accept this letter for the message it contains. You have a brilliant life ahead of you. I knew it from the second that Nina brought you through the door to my house. I knew that you were a kid who wasn’t going to be deceived for long. I’ll never forget your brother getting into the van. I was scared shitless about the trouble he was in back in New York, and I was scared that he was going to bring the police down on us. At the same time, I was trying to be credible, so that your brother wouldn’t tell all of you kids that I wasn’t who I said I was. I could see in your brother’s eyes that he was a troubled guy but also that he wasn’t going to be taken in. I could see all of that.

  I never would have hurt Nina. You know that. I mean, I don’t know if you can understand that now, but I never would have hurt Nina. I was starting to panic and I had some idea that maybe I could get your brother to move on, go back out wherever it was that he was supposed to go, to the county jail, or whatever. That was a little selfish, considering that I always had a real affection and respect for you.

  All of this was about loving kids, see, and that’s what I’ll leave you with here, that I loved you kids, because I never had any kids of my own, and it looks like I never will. I got into my job because I wanted to make the world better, and I never felt like I did until I met all of you, and then I felt like I had accomplished something, for a while, anyway. People like me want to give something away to the world, and then when we get the chance, it comes out wrong. That’s not how I wanted it to go, because I loved you kids, and I never wanted to do wrong by you. I wanted to prove to you that the world is good, that you can make a difference. See, you can go out there with no more than a forked stick and find all the good in the world.

  Viva la revolution,

  Eduardo

  Max hears the rustle of his approaching mother and he crumples the pages and shoves them into the pocket of his jacket. His mother, out of breath, leans against a sturdy oak.

  “So what are you doing out here?”

  He holds up his divining rod. His scanty twig. As if it will explain.

  “Looking for water.”

  25

  Midmorning on Friday, Vanessa takes a pad from her desk drawer full of skittering pens and paper clips, and begins writing down the list of horrible circumstances: her mother going into detox, dealing with all of that; her mother having fled detox for points unknown; Annabel’s brother, and whether or not he hit some woman on the head with a brick; Lois DiNunzio, missing at first, presumed dead; the fifty thousand dollars that Lois embezzled; how to pay the rent next month because of Lois; the miniseries, the six different versions of the miniseries out there, and the eight different women who supposedly wrote the novel, or play, or whatever, on which the miniseries is supposedly based; all the producers and agents insisting that they came up with the idea or packaged the idea, an idea that now seems to have some kind of buzz attached to it; and that’s just a beginning on the list of horrible circumstances, at least until Annabel knocks on her door, and she waves her in.

  “Got a second?”

  “Have you and Madison made any headway working on a writer for the . . .”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Does that mean you have someone? We have to have a writer, that’s the thing. And it can’t be some movie guy. Has to be someone completely uninterested in art. It could be a woman. It could be a woman with no conscience. Someone who lives and eats and breathes the small screen, the social Darwinism of the small screen, the sentimentality of the small screen. Someone really calculating, really heartless, bloodthirsty.”

  “We don’t have a particular someone yet, but we have names and we’re working on them. We’re ahead of you, and we’re expecting to, um, have results really soon.”

  “Let me know as soon as you —”

  “Well, that’s actually why I —”

  “What? Are you going to resign?”

  “Well, actually —”

  A sharp, puncturing wound, here it comes, to go with the others. An awl driven into Vanessa. As if she’s a faux-leather belt being manufactured by some sweatshop preteen in Malaysia. She sets the pen on the pad, gets ready to write down Annabel quits before it even happens.

  “A leave of absence, that’s what I want to talk about.”

  And then Annabel launches into this explanation about her brother. Something has happened with her brother, a breakdown of some kind. Her brother was abducted, she says. She’s using all this language that you’d hear from cop shows: abduction, deprogramming, secret terrorist cells. Vanessa doesn’t quite get the details. Supposedly Tyrone hit some woman with a brick, as mentioned above, and then maybe he hadn’t hit some woman with a brick, and then he had taken flight, and then, Annabel claims, he was involved with some kind of ecoterrorist organization. Isn’t that just kids from Ithaca or Santa Cruz smoking weed and going without showers? Sort of like that. Not like the Red Brigades or Baader-Meinhof. Has he built himself a tree house and refused to come down? Has he started protesting in favor of hemp? No, this was some dangerous nationwide organization in which discrete cells operated without mutual contact and without any central organizing authority. The organization may have performed some kind of brainwashing on Tyrone. And on her younger brother, too. What is certain is that Annabel needs to go back to Massachusetts and be with her family while they begin the process of healing. This healing process might involve a couple of weeks. Annabel wears this resolve on her pretty face as though she has rarely been as sure of anything. She is already immersed in her journey of healing, and her resolve makes it impossible for Vanessa to complain about the timing and about how the office is shorthanded as it is because of Lois DiNunzio. How is Vanessa going to hire someone to fill Annabel’s spot? The arrangement is that you always have to hire your replacement, but Vanessa can’t say anything about it because of the journey of healing, and she just begins to sweat with anxiety about the whole thing, which is when she remembers another thing that she forgot to put on the list. Her period. She hates getting her period.

  “I know you have a lot going on right now,” Annabel continues, “and I know you’re really concerned about your . . . Well, my situation is important, too, otherwise I wouldn’t ask, and I just need to be up in Newton, where I can be closer to what’s going on.”

  Vanessa wants to point out that she, Vanessa, is at work, and her mother has escaped from detox, and she is here at her desk while her mother is hiding out with Emilia Commito, matriarch of the Park Slope ravioli empire. Her mother is attempting to punish Vanessa for carting her off to detox in the first place, and so Vanessa’s mother has gone to Emilia’s, where she’s lying on the couch watching talk shows and complaining about Mark Green’s mayoral campaign, and Vanessa feels distraught and awful and has been having Jeanine call the police and the hospitals every few hours.

  “What are you going to do up there? Isn’t it going to be kind of boring?”

  Annabel gives her a doe-eyed look, as if Vanessa has said something really awful, and that’s when it strikes Vanessa. Vanessa always forgets that the entire office is and has long been synchronized in this area, the menses. But Annabel doesn’t cry; she shimmies up some metaphorical flagpole of resolve, to rest there pridefully. Where the healing is.

  “It doesn’t have that much to do with what I need,” Annabel says. “It has to d
o with just thinking, like, what’s the best thing for Tyrone? The best thing is if I go up there and help out.”

  “I don’t really think it’s that great a thing for your career. I mean, I think if you are expecting to have a long career in independent film, you need to put this organization ahead of everything else. Like Adam Weinstein, who gave up his apartment so he could sleep on the editing-room floor. That’s letting no one come between you and the project. That’s creative control. Or Hope Oliver, maxing out her credit card, persuading her mother and stepfather to take out a second mortgage, you know. Then selling the broadcasting rights for millions. People do what has to be done. That’s the way to do business.”

  “We don’t always agree,” Annabel says. She’s standing by the door. She must not be feeling as bad as Vanessa usually feels when the cramps really start roiling in her. Maybe healing and closure are even more powerful than ambition and sentimentality and cramps, and who is Vanessa to criticize closure, although she just hates the fact that anything could be more important than Means of Production. Annabel tells her to take care, and then she’s gone, and Vanessa thinks she’ll probably never be back again.

  She puts Annabel’s name down on the list.

  The intern comes in. The intern has a bag of doughnuts. The wordless intern, who looks as if she’s about to play the role of victim in a women’s self-defense class, in her torn fishnets, miniskirt, and black long-sleeved rock-and-roll tour T-shirt. The intern has brought the original glazed doughnuts of the Krispy Kreme empire. The intern sets these on Vanessa’s desk and then she stands there digging at a hangnail while Vanessa plunges a hand into the bag of doughnuts and selects one. Nothing could be better at the present stressful moment.

  The intern has been associated with Means of Production for a number of days now, despite which Vanessa has not yet thought to ask the intern if she has a name, or any interests, or what she is working on. Yet suddenly she wants to ask the intern this information because the intern has brought doughnuts (the cane, that is, loosens the tongue), and also because it is definitely the case that the intern has not been here long enough to have her period synchronize with everyone else’s. She is therefore the one person who is free of abdominal suffering.

  “Hey, so what’s your name?”

  The intern gives her first name.

  “Do you have a surname, Allison?”

  “Maiser.”

  Vanessa chews the doughnut in silence, doesn’t let on that she has heard anything out of the ordinary. But she has; she has heard syllables that could change her entire future, that could change everything for Means of Production in this trying organizational moment. Visions of a new office in a hip downtown location again dance in Vanessa’s head, likewise awards speeches, a country house, a personal trainer, cheese of the month.

  “Do you want a doughnut, Allison Maiser?”

  “I already had two.”

  “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Santa Monica.”

  “They have Krispy Kreme out there?”

  The intern contorts herself into some kind of scorn that Vanessa believes is meant to convey that Allison cannot be bothered to think about doughnuts. However, Vanessa doesn’t want anyone, any staff member, even any intern, demeaning the integrity of the doughnut. Not in a bad-luck environment. Not now. There is bad luck everywhere, there are bad circumstances, and the least the intern could do would be to honor the integrity of the doughnut. However, because Allison Maiser is who she is, Vanessa says nothing. The intern is back to chewing at her hangnail when Thaddeus Griffin sticks his head in the doorway.

  “Got a second?”

  Griffin has not been around much in a few days, and when he has been around, he has been more than remote. Just another example of the kind of intrigues taking place out in the corridor beyond Vanessa’s control.

  “Got something I want to tell you.”

  He looks at the intern and then at the decorative palm in the corner, as if the two are equal in his sight.

  “Don’t mind her. Have you guys met?”

  Allison Maiser will not budge unless ordered. Vanessa points at the vacant chair. Thaddeus, running his hands nervously through his colorist-enhanced movie star hair, slinks across the office, clearing his throat several times. He sits in the empty chair next to the intern. He reaches for a doughnut.

  “I’m not supposed to eat these.”

  “No one in Hollywood is too smart for doughnuts.”

  “But some in Hollywood are too thin.”

  “If Atkins said eat doughnuts, people’d eat them by the dozen.”

  He looks at the intern again, hoping she will remember some other assigned task. “The thing is, I got an offer for a big film, The Tempest of Sahara.”

  “You got what?”

  “An offer. The Tempest of Sahara, a big costume picture.”

  “That can’t be the title.”

  “It used to be called Assassins, but then they changed the title to The Tempest of Sahara.”

  “That’s funny because —”

  “Filming is in Morocco. Starts in January. Morocco. How often do you get to see Morocco? Yeah, and the wife wants to come. So we’ll be shipping off to Paris in December, for rehearsals, and from there to Morocco. Where we’ll smoke a lot of hashish. Probably be gone for four or five months.”

  “I thought I . . .” Is the sinking feeling just a sinking feeling or could it be something worse? There are definitely going to be bad cramps today. Sometimes the cramps are so bad she wants to curl up and die. Is there ibuprofen in the desk drawer, skittering around with the paper clips and half-empty jars of antidepressants?

  “It’s a great script. I think there are only three lines in the last half hour, and those are monosyllables. A lot of scantily clad women in their twenties. The ammunition budget exceeds the GDP of some of the African nations where the second unit will be shooting.”

  “Are you —”

  “I don’t feel like I have that much choice right now. It’s not like much else has been coming from my agent.”

  “What about the miniseries?” Vanessa says.

  What is it with actors? When a genuine emotion passes through them, a rare enough occurrence, it’s as if it’s a dental emergency. That’s how Thaddeus seems, like the dentist is going to send him out to specialists. He’s going to need implants, and his face is going to swell. But at the mention of the miniseries, he rallies, and the sullenness that perfumes him vanishes. He gathers himself up in the chair and starts riffing on the possibilities.

  The networks can’t help but snap it up, he says. One of the cable affiliates, maybe. Lately, the cable networks are taking on a lot of this kind of thing. And Thaddeus says he has some ideas for writers, really great writers. And there are some subplots that she should really be thinking about. He gets so excited that he smacks the intern on the shoulder and then fishes a second doughnut out of the bag.

  “The Mormon exodus. Think about it. I mean, they walked across the desert to Salt Lake City, pursued by murderous bands. There was a lot of division in the church at that time. The polygamy thing could play really big on the screen. You could have a strong leading man playing Brigham Young. De Niro. He’d look really good with a beard, a big beard, and he’d have all these wives, and it would sort of be like Charlton Heston not making it into the promised land, right? Brigham Young with his wives, and they’re pursued by murderers, going over the Rocky Mountains. They ring the wagons and they take out their guns. How many of the heads of Mormon households will get murdered? And not just a little bit murdered, but cut up and fed to the wolves out there? How many wives are cut down because the Christian oppressors won’t accept that the polygamous Mormons are God’s chosen people? And there’s never any water, and there’s a day where Brigham Young, he’s just had enough, and maybe he really thinks that Joseph Smith made up the entire business about Moroni, and he just doesn’t know; his faith is weak. He calls up a diviner from his midst! Brigham Yo
ung, he’s just always taken these women around him for granted, he’s got all these wives, cousins of his other wives, and he’s just always taken them for granted, and he’s never known that they had special skills, and he retires to his tent to pray to God to ask if this is the right thing to do. And the dowser turns out to be Brigham’s wife Honora, who is played by Susan Sarandon or one of those other beautiful older women! Will the Indians, who are supposed to be the special allies of the Mormons, allow them free passage through the plains? It’s a great story, see, and that would be the way to ensure that Madison’s new boyfriend —”

  “Her what?”

  “Yeah, you know. He wants to —”

  “Oh, yeah. The Interstate Mortuary Services guy.”

  “I heard it out in the hall.”

  Vanessa asks Thaddeus about his last day, and he says he’ll come in next week to pick up stuff and after that he’s on his way. He stands behind the chair now, drums on its seat back. Thaddeus Griffin, of Single Bullet Theory. A guy who’s no good at saying good-bye, who’s no good at anything except holding steady a firearm full of blanks. Vanessa writes on her pad, Thaddeus goes to Morocco. He comes around the desk to give her a hug.

  “I still work here,” he says. “You need help with anything, you know what to do.”

  He gives the intern a wary glance and makes for the door.

  It’s the sentimentality part that she can’t stand. With the menses. The mother bird feeding the little birds on the nature program. It was a while back, she was flipping around the dial, as if all she ever did was flip around the dial, and whether by chance or design, she landed on this channel, and there was the mother bird feeding the little birds the regurgitated worm or grub or whatever it was, and the little birds were really hungry, edging out one another to be the first chick to devour the regurgitations. What could be more tender on this earth than the little birds and the awful New Age music? The whole phenomenon was so irritating that she took the remote and hid it in the closet with the hardware and the cat litter, and she couldn’t find it for a week.