The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  Vic Freese’s wife, Lise, says, during the commercial break, “You know, I can’t stand it that you’re suddenly taking notes during the entire show. Couldn’t we just sit here and watch the show? You used to watch the show because it was fun to watch, and now you just sit here and you take notes, like television is nothing but an opportunity to work for you. If we can’t sit together and have a quiet night together, like we used to do, then what’s the point? Now it’s all just the agency, agency, agency, agency, and how everybody is jealous of your success and how everybody wants to steal that teenage slut client away from you. But what about your kids, and what about me? I liked it better when you were a failure, if you want to know the truth. I liked it better when you used to say that work was neurotic and all the people at the agency were neurotic and never had any fun in their lives and they were all going to die young. Are you going to die young, too? Now that you’re mister codirector of the television division? Or are you just going to sit there taking notes and not even listen to me when I’m talking to you? You’re going to pretend I’m not even talking to you? I don’t really care if I wake the kids up. I want the guy I dated and the guy I married. He was sweet and gentle and would play miniature golf, and I think the kids want that guy, too, not some guy who never comes home or who comes home after they’re already asleep, and then when he does come home, all he does is turn on the television and start taking notes and blustering into his dictating machine. Is that what you want? Is that what you really want, to be like that? Forget it, I don’t even care what happens, I don’t care if the werewolf gets the girl, and I don’t care what happens to your miniseries. I’m going to bed.”

  The director of the Duffy family documentary pans again over the assembled, as the final four minutes of the show begin. She’s part of her own melodrama now. Though it is so far unspoken. She has her own multigenerational secret, one that she has not announced to the American family, which lounges around her in its American-family tableau. It’s a melancholy secret, to be sure, an unwanted secret, and yet perhaps a hopeful secret, too, this secret of conception. Even in such a fraught moment, when her brother’s future is uncertain and the election is uncertain and her employment situation is a little uncertain, the chromosome-hauling spermatozoan will, given the right conditions, and notwithstanding the frequent impotence of the father, nonetheless occasionally perform its endurance-swimming trick and crash through the wall of the ovum, even if the birth control pill is said to be 99 percent effective. It’s melancholy that Thaddeus isn’t answering his cell phone, that he has apparently decamped for California, or that’s the rumor, before going off to Morocco to shoot his swashbuckling epic, and she doesn’t even know how to tell him about the spermatozoan and its accomplished mission. But because she hasn’t told him, hasn’t told anyone yet about her idea that she just might keep the little fetus with the action film- star daddy, it seems like nothing but good news, as if somehow it’s going to turn out all right for all the generations of the family; somehow they need one another, even if they can’t stand one another, and the little fetus needs everyone to give him or her a break, give him or her a while to turn into an actual person rather than just the potential of personhood. Love is best expressed as the likelihood of a little mixed-race baby for now, she thinks, over the forms of half-conscious family members in the living room, while ministering with her camera.

  It’s going to be an amazing documentary, probably much better than her script about the wife of the Marquis de Sade, and one thing about it that will revolutionize filmmaking is the pacing. Instead of a lot of stuff happening all the time, the newly pregnant filmmaker has decided on a static approach, as in avant-garde film. There are going to be large patches of film where nothing much happens at all. The film will have mimetic aspirations. It will attempt to re-create the pacing of real family life, the long periods between revelation in which the manipulative and semifascist plot structure of Hollywood and contemporary television serial narratives will have no place. That fascist kind of work creates attention deficit disorder in audiences, and it probably creates that spike in the rates of autism that everybody talks about, too. And that’s why the newly pregnant filmmaker lingers on the sleeping form of the Reverend Russell Duffy, who can be expected to sleep through almost any after-dinner television programming. He always expresses strong opinions about what they watch: no on comedies, no on teen films, yes on Provence or Tuscany and anything with a classical music theme. But having expressed an interest in content, the reverend cannot stay awake longer than fifteen minutes, and often the volume has to be turned up so that everyone can hear over his snoring.

  The others talk freely, despite the slumbering man of God, but before the newly pregnant filmmaker can capture the tenor of their conversation, the television program is back, and the flickering of the monitor plays across their faces.

  What they are seeing is Felicia Adams in the morning. The morning after Thanksgiving, in the kitchen, at dawn, trying to straighten up things in the house before the others wake. Suddenly she hears the front door open. There she finds her eldest son, holding some scraps of a towel around his middle so as to conceal his Edenic nakedness from her. The close-up on Felicia’s face captures the slow play of meanings in her. He must have gotten into some kind of devilment with his friends. He must have gotten into some trouble with a girl. Or he must be . . . The surprise is in how long it takes, considering that the notion can’t have ever been far from her thinking. It’s always darkest right under the lamp. Apparently she has tried to believe anything but the notion that her son has the lupine gene, as any mother would.

  “Mommy,” Bennett says, “something awful happened to me last night. I don’t even know . . . I don’t even know how to say it. I’m so scared, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Now there’s one of those Madonna-and-child moments in the front hall of the apartment, where lately Vern reclined while romancing the carcass of a turkey. The two of them slide to the floor, the boy weeping as though he’s still just a kid trapped in the expanding body of an adolescent. There’s blood all over his hands and arms, a volume of blood that no person should have to see, especially no one as young as Bennett. His mother lets him cry for a while as he tries to describe what cannot be described. “There was something happening to my body. I was over at Merry’s house, and suddenly something happened to my body, and I was . . . I was covered in fur, and then I can remember that I ran out of the party on . . . on all fours.” And then a fresh helping of tears.

  When she has said nothing for so long that it is maternal callousness, Bennett Adams finally looks up at his mother, and suspicion begins to pass across his own features. Her gaze is level, determined, unsentimental.

  “We’ve got to get all this blood off you before your brother wakes,” she says. “Come with me into the kitchen.”

  And the two of them, confederates, tread softly into the kitchen, where she turns on the tap in the big sink basin and immerses his hands in the water. With a generous bar of soap, she soaps his hands in her own, and the water cascades across his bloodied knuckles, and this water foreshadows developments in next week’s episode, the hydrophobia episode, about which there has already been voluminous conjecture on the chat boards.

  “Mom?” he says, and the nakedness of the interrogative tells much about the suffering of werewolves, from their origin in Middle Europe to their postmodern anguish in the evolving genetic picture of the new millennium.

  “Yes,” Felicia says.

  “You, too?” he says.

  “Yes,” she says. She knows. She has felt these things. She, too, has suffered. “But don’t say anything more about it now. Don’t say anything more.” And she gives his hands another round of soap and water and then dries them with a dish towel. Now Felicia leads the boy into the back bedroom, where his bed occupies most of the available floor, and she lays him down on the mattress and pulls the covers over him.

  “It seems like it’s a curse,” she says t
o him. “It seems like you are doomed every month when the moon is full. But there comes a time when it seems like a blessing, like you’re better somehow. You know the taste of warm blood still pulsing, and that’s something that most people will never know. You’re special now, because you have ripped the limb from a living animal and watched it bleed to death, and because you no longer have to pay attention to property lines or the laws of the politicians or the morals of the churches, or any of that. You are the laws of nature. And yet after a while, even that becomes a curse, and then you learn the one bit of grace in all of this, and that’s the law of the pack. The pack is the one place you’re understood now. The pack is the place where your mistakes and your failures are your assets. The pack is where you can get out of any jam that you can get into. If you can’t find a job, go to the men and women of the pack. And if you don’t have a friend anywhere, go to the men and women of the pack. If you can’t believe in anything good on the face of this earth, go to the men and the women of the pack. They’re everywhere around you, though you’ve never seen them. Your mailman might be a member of the pack, and your teacher might be one, and your doctor might be, and even your own mother might be, though you’ve never known until now.” She smiles at him. “Okay, better get some sleep, because you’re bound to get into trouble again tonight.”

  He’s already asleep. Or nearly so.

  Felicia rises up from his bedside and she closes the door to his bedroom behind her, and on the far side, she slumps against the door, stifling sobs and wondering how she can take this, too, this on top of everything else. How much stronger can a woman be?

  Closing credits. And theme music. The announcer tells all to stay tuned.

  At which point the assembled constituencies, in all the millions of living rooms, the living rooms of some huge portion of the industrial West, exhale and begin to abandon the television set. There’s nothing worth watching after, and in one living room in Newton, Mass., the newly pregnant filmmaker of a powerful new documentary about family life looks down at the book that her older brother has been marking up throughout the episode of The Werewolves of Fairfield County, and it looks like this:

  28

  There are days when the only question in the waiting room of the hospital is about the quality of her consciousness. And yet the victim has no consciousness of her habits and opinions, only the consciousness of the brick. The brick has no consciousness itself, or so it is often believed. And yet here is the brick considering its manifestations. Or perhaps the consciousness of the brick and the consciousness of the victim have become twinned in their perceptions. For the victim, the consciousness of impact is lost. Not so for the brick. The consciousness of the moment of the impact, when the victim is talking on her cell phone, walking briskly to or from the library, depending on the account, is alive for the brick, when it becomes an instrument of death, collides with her, crushes a portion of the side of her skull; when she is facedown on the sidewalk, and the cell phone has gone skittering, and the blood flows liberally from her skull; when the brick is cast aside, to return to its formerly inert state. Lost to history, lost to the victim, except that she hears the brick calling to her.

  Of course, the victim does not know that she has collided with a brick. She knows only that she is in a serene blackness of indefinite duration and proportion. In this space there are murmurings, and these murmurings are disconnected and without meaning, and they appear amid portions of blackness that have nothing at all associated with them, no variation, no density, no volume. If there are words overheard, murmurings, they are heard at such a distance that they sound more like a massing of insects.

  The brick comes from an oven somewhere, a kiln, from some locale plentiful in the labor necessary to produce a brick, an area that offers costs of labor far cheaper than what is available here in the metropolitan region. The brick is from Romania, or the brick is from the Yucatán, or the brick is from a factory in West Virginia, where the brick-producing factories are soon to shutter once and for all. Men and women there have manufactured bricks for forty-five years, but they soon will be looking for work in the service sector. This brick is made of clay, and the brick was fired at high temperatures, and there was a medium that bound the clay and gave it pigment in a giant convectionary bowl of some kind, where the mixture was assembled, and thereafter the brick was shaped and fired. The brick is nothing but earth. It has no history except in recollection, as an agent of death. In this instant of the victim’s life after the collision with the brick, the first instant that the victim recognizes as such, what she is conscious of is the brick.

  The eruption of color is terrifying. The eruption is painful, and the pain is associated with this perception of the brick and its history. And there is a word written on the side of the brick, it must be that a word is written there, this occurs to her, a word that will identify the factory where the brick was made; she is aware of wanting to read the word, though words and letters are impenetrable to her, and she is not sure what an alphabet is or if she could ever read from one. Still, this name on the brick will have some kind of lesson for her.

  The victim has no name, and in the intervals of hearing nothing and feeling nothing and seeing nothing, this namelessness is of no consequence. In fact, it’s a blessing. Without a name, there is no sense that the not-hearing and not-seeing and not-feeling of the victim are anything but aspects of a system that never loses any energy, never winds down. There’s no need in a system like this for a name, so the victim does not know that she has no name, nor does she experience herself as a victim, except as a victim of eruptions of light and color. Light, associating itself with some agony in her skull, implies she has a skull, that she is not simply a brick that has some name written on it, for example, the word Utica. What a shapely and beautiful word Utica is because it must be the name of a something. The name must be other than the brick; it must be a recognition of some other system of things, a system that includes light and sound, and that includes an overheard pageant of insects chirruping words like Utica, which is or must be a place where bricks are made and which may or may not be the place that this brick was made.

  She has only a brief time to notice and evaluate the history of the brick, which is a history of the land in a place called Utica, however, because there is blackness and the blackness is without period or characteristic, and when she is enveloped in it she is it, except that she isn’t, because more and more the chirruping seems to resemble certain things, words, though she isn’t sure from which past she remembers these things, because if she is a brick, how would it be possible that she could remember things, unless, for example, she remembers the earth. Still, she remembers these words or thinks she overhears these words, and these words are indicators of something having to do with a brick and having to do with a woman.

  One day, from a mothballed place, she performs a trick that she can’t remember ever having performed before. Suddenly, for a moment, she sees, and this is a monumental event for the victim because when she is a seeing apparatus, she believes that she may not be a brick, but rather a woman, or at least attached to the body of a woman. And there are other things she knows, in this brief moment before the system is shut down again. She believes, for example, that she knows about blankets.

  There is such a thing as a blanket, and a blanket is blue, because this is its color. The place where she is, this thinking and seeing apparatus (which may or may not be a brick or a woman), is in bed, and she is looking at a blanket, and this is what a blanket is: a blanket is a thing that is draped across a body to prevent it from growing cold, and whoever it is who puts the blanket on the body, if in fact a person puts the blanket on the body, this is an entity of kindness. There are sheets here, too, this is another word she remembers, and there’s a feeling to sheets, depending on what kind of sheets they are and whether these sheets are thin or heavy. Sheets feel a certain way when they are crisp, starchy, or draped across your body. Still, the woman has had enough of think
ing, and so she sleeps again, and this sleep may last for a day or more, and the sleep may include a portion of consciousness that may be partly awake and partly asleep, and these portions of consciousness may include scraps of things that are said to the victim, or these portions of consciousness may not, or that is what a doctor says within earshot of the victim, that it is okay to speak to her and to touch her, as these things may help her.

  Which implies that there must be others in the room. There are people in the room. The brain injury that the brick caused makes it hard to recognize these others or to tell anything about them, and so she sleeps through the notion of other people, perhaps she forgets them for an entire day, so that it is Monday, or even Tuesday, and she has entirely forgotten that there are people in the room. But it becomes unavoidable, the conclusion that she is a mind exercising itself, and in these days when she is asleep or unconscious, she begins to have certain tasks that she performs; one of these is the cataloguing of colors, since she is often seeing colors: mustard, orange, rust, russet, mud, black.