The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  “You trying to hide me away from your famous boyfriend!”

  “Raoul! Absolutely not!”

  “You saying that I’m not good enough?” It’s just what he was afraid of. The outrage gathers momentum, like a chain reaction, beginning as a peevish jocularity and moving through bitter resentment into full-scale meltdown.

  “I am saying no such thing! I’m saying that we do not yet know what the movie star wants, and in the absence of information, we should wait and see what it is that he wants, and that requires the stealthy strategy of a feline —”

  “You calling me —”

  “I’m not calling you anything except my dear sweet boy who has made my life tolerable. I’m just explaining —”

  “I can go out on the street and wait for you there, if that’s what you want. I come into your house like this, you ought to treat me with respect. Because I have things I can do. I can go away!”

  “Raoul! Please don’t do this! Not now. I am your cheering section and your federal agency. I love you no matter what. Please just understand —”

  In fact, Raoul has taken a bad turn in recent days. Raoul has stopped looking rosy in the way he was, even though Randall is making sure that he takes what he’s supposed to take, and he has stopped expressing the joy he was previously expressing. Raoul has mostly lain around on the couch, complaining about a program called American Spy, which bothers him because he thinks the participants are unpleasant. Perhaps it will be this way until spring training, when his pastime can again lighten his heart. Whatever the cause, Randall Tork does not have liberty to ponder it, because the doorbell is ringing—because it is twelve noon sharp on the Monday after Thanksgiving, the appointed day and time—and now the movie star has come to call, here at the little house on stilts.

  The movie star is graceful and full of humility as he stoops and crosses the threshold. The movie star hands over his scarf and his leather jacket, and he smiles at Randall and compliments him on the house, on its elimination of inessential furnishings, the concealment of all books, the warm light that suffuses the premises with genteel hospitality. All things, it should go without saying, that Randall Tork has premeditated in the presentation of his modest bunker. If the movie star notices the lump on the couch, he doesn’t say anything about it, and neither does Randall. At the kitchen table, after the wine is poured from the decanter and after the movie star performs a neophyte’s swirling and sniffing, the conversation at last begins.

  “Let me know what you think,” Randall says. “Grape juice. Just a trifle. I have a couple of other things I want you to try.”

  “Excellent.”

  The movie star gives the wine pause, a pause that the movie star apparently thinks he must observe, before getting onto the subject he has genuinely come here to address.

  “Listen, Randall—it’s okay if I call you Randall, right? I didn’t really come here to discuss wine, which I’m sure is kind of an unusual thing to say under the circumstances. Since that’s what you’re known for. I really admire what you do as a writer, and that’s why I’m here. It’s like I said the last time we saw each other. I think I said then that I didn’t think you were just a wine writer, any more than Hemingway was just a writer about bullfights. I think you’re one of the great contemporary writers, I really do, and believe it or not, I do read. Once you get locked into doing what I do, you’re sort of stuck there. There are lots of compensations, sure, but there are lots of costs, too. For example, no one believes I got a good education at a good college. No one believes that I love to read and that I admire the great storytellers, you know? It’s true. I even write.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call what I do writing; it’s more like blocking out big chunks of story. You know. I try to develop scripts and stuff. That’s what I’ve tried to do for the last few years, in New York. And recently I’ve had a little good news. That’s really why I’m here. I’ve finally got something set up, or just about set up, something that has the potential to be a really big project, you know, the kind of thing that has major-studio involvement, major money on the table. A blockbuster.”

  “Is this a —”

  “Not a motion picture, actually. It’s a . . . well, it’s sort of a television thing, really. It’s a . . . miniseries.”

  “A what?”

  “Just listen for a second. It’s not every day that I have a conversation like this, Randall. Let me tell you a little bit about what’s really going on. Let me tell you a little bit what it’s like. My name has been in the papers lately, and not in good circumstances. The kind of coverage that you don’t exactly want to get. And that sort of coverage has not exactly endeared me to my family, if you see what I mean. I’m about to go film a movie in the desert, Randall, a movie called The Tempest of Sahara, which has to be one of the dumbest scripts I’ve ever read. And when I’m through filming there, in three months, and I come back to the wreckage of my married life, I don’t exactly know what I’ll find. The production company that I helped found is at death’s door, money problems, embezzlement; I have every bit of bad luck you could think of.

  “Still, I had this idea about a month ago, for a miniseries. About diviners. Diviners, Randall, you know, the guys with the, with the —”

  “Forked sticks.”

  “And this prompted me to read a little bit about the arid places of the world, Randall. It started out as a joke. The whole story started out as a joke. I guess I can come clean, Randall, because you seem like a guy who could, who has been . . . I feel like you’ll understand, and the thing is, the story started as a joke to impress someone, Randall. It was spun out on a cocktail napkin in a bar. But then I started reading about the deserts, about the American West, and about the struggle for water, which, you know, is a struggle as old as man. There’s always been this class of magicians, Randall, and they’re, like, they’re the priest class in the desert, they get to wear the best outfits, these ones who know where the water is; I started to see that there was always something magical happening in the desert, there was this awesome deprivation and savagery going on, and then on the other hand, there were these little moments of grace, from generation to generation, whenever the diviners were on the scene, and that’s when I got the idea for this series. Once I started writing I couldn’t stop. The words were just pouring out, Randall, I never had an experience like this before, I’m not . . . I’m probably not really an artist. I’m not a guy who lies awake at night with bits of inspiration floating through my head. But once I got the idea to start writing this story, Randall, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was like I was the desert, like I was the parched landscape, and the rainfall, the storm was breaking over me, for no reason other than I was in a bad patch and I was being given this chance to make something out of it.”

  The movie star’s earnestness is commanding enough that Randall Tork can hardly look away. He refills the wineglasses. The movie star drinks his down as though it really were grape juice. Randall, who normally tastes the stuff and spits it out, feels somehow compelled to keep up, as the movie star begins to spin out his deluxe plot summary. Can anything on earth truly be duller than a movie or book digested by some brainless hunk of protoplasm who didn’t read carefully in the first place? Randall would rather die than listen to plot summary. But that was before he got pitched by a movie star. Now, as the movie star tells him that the story begins at the dawn of time and moves up through the Dark Ages, into the Crusades, he’s thoroughly charmed. The movie star could give the plot summary of the new post-deregulation phone book, and Randall would think it rather adorable. This is how the colloquy goes, until something really special happens.

  What is the thing that happens? The thing that happens is that the movie star begins to tell Randall Tork about the discovery of Las Vegas. What was Las Vegas? Las Vegas was nothing; it didn’t exist. Nothing existed, for the Spanish, on the road to Los Angeles, except a dozen days or more in the open sun with just the brackish water that the wayfarers managed to ca
rry with them along the way. Many were lost, as the movie star tells it, many were lost, and that’s without bothering to mention the assaults of the natives, who came from out of limitless nothingness where no one should have lived, to surround each and every band of Spaniards, stealing their women and scalping their men. Sometime in the early nineteenth century a young Spanish adventurer, Rafael Rivera, on a journey across this very desert, decided that the natives had to be coming from somewhere, from some verdancy out there in the wasteland. There had to be water; there had to be waving fields. There was no other explanation. And Rafael Rivera set out across the desert with courageous confederates. No one expected anything of him, only that they would later find his shiny skeleton, picked clean. But what did Rafael find? He found an oasis, and he named it for its waving fields, Las Vegas. It cut the trip to Los Angeles in half because it was no longer necessary to go around.

  A beautiful little story, of course, and as part of the larger narrative, it would necessarily include a dowser as one of the courageous confederates. But what piques the interest of Randall Tork, of course, is the role of Rafael. In general, the rest of the story is a little silly. Who cares if there were other, older explorers along for the ride? Who is going to play Rafael Rivera in this miniseries? It seems completely natural to him that Raoul, his intended, his plighted troth, would be perfect for the part, since he is already Hispanic, and he is beautiful to behold, and the gravity of his illness would look entirely appropriate out in the merciless desert. So overwhelming is the idea of trying to cast Raoul in the role of Rafael that he doesn’t at first pay attention to what comes next.

  “The thing is, Randall, you know and I know that the world hates a guy with two ambitions. The world wants me to do the one thing, and that’s fire off blanks from an automatic weapon. Especially with all the trouble I’ve gotten myself into recently. Everywhere I go lately, there’s a guy with a beer gut and a telephoto lens waiting for me to pick my nose. I had to change cars twice and duck into a men’s room just to get here without anyone following me. And so it’s just not for me to try to be the writer on this script, even though I’m really proud of what I’ve come up with. I don’t want to go through the whole process of coming up with a pseudonym or any of that nonsense. I want someone to flesh out the story for me, Randall; I want someone to be the writer for me. I want someone who really has something, who really has the gift, who really has the inspiration that maybe I have had this week but that I’ll probably never have again. I want someone who has the real vision to do this for me, to be the name on the poster for The Diviners. You could work on the script with me if you want, Randall, it’s really up to you. You’d get a cut on the whole project and a credit that you can use to your advantage later on if you want. You’ve got a name and a reputation, a great reputation among the people who could really help to finance a project like this, and you’re a natural, so why wouldn’t you write a script?”

  Why wouldn’t he, indeed? Is he not Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history? And has he not always, in the back of his mind, known that one day he would turn his abilities toward something that served as a more likely platform for world domination? His editor has often told him he has a novel in him, for example, and if not a novel, why not a thirteen-episode miniseries, with a three-hour pilot, that goes from the dawn of man up to Las Vegas? He is a natural, really, as long as one point can be negotiated. And that point is Raoul.

  “Well,” Randall says. “This is all so sudden. All so very sudden. But I must say, Thaddeus—if it’s okay that I call you Thaddeus—I’m touched and honored. I really am. Because there must have been any number of writers, experts in other fields, whom you must have considered—although I’m obviously more qualified than all of them. Still, I’m honored. Touched and honored. Obviously, I’ll need to think about it for a few days, and would it be possible to take a gander at some pages from your script? I think that might be the way to proceed, just so that I can see to what I might be signing my name? It’s really a very provocative proposal you bring, and I will give it my utmost consideration.”

  Then Randall says, “Oh, and by the way, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  If his husband-to-be, Raoul, is going to secure the role of Rafael, it would be best if the movie star could meet him first. He certainly hopes that Raoul can hold his tongue and not say any of those incredibly impulsive things he says sometimes, because here it is, the movie star’s proposal, delivered in a passionate and intensive forty-five-minute tête-à-tête over a Château Lafite, and could anything be so wonderful and so sudden as this proposal? Nothing could. He just wants Raoul to share in the outrageous wonderfulness of it, and after the shoot they will perhaps wed, in a large ceremony in Sedona, because it wouldn’t be all that far from Las Vegas, and so perhaps they could get married in that spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright chapel up in the rocks, and perhaps the movie star would agree to be the best man for the both of them. Randall rinses the crystal out and then he points at the living room. Thaddeus tarries in the doorway. Beyond, the television screen murmurs hopelessly.

  “Raoul, honey?” Randall says. Though he never employs cheap endearments. “Raoul, honey? Are you awake?”

  30

  The desperate venture to the city of Las Vegas on Interstate Fifteen. They don’t fly in. Airports are for frauds. Hip-hop impresario Mercurio? He’s in town, convening a high-stakes game of poker at the Venetian. Mercurio flies into town on the record company jet. Lacey? She is said to be in town, having returned from Europe. Europe, she says, is boring. Lacey has been drinking in the bars at the Bellagio. There are governors and congressmen here, there are judges and CEOs, there are sheiks and organized-crime figures. They all use the airport. But the desperate, those who pay for the bricks of the empire, they do not fly into Las Vegas. They come through the desert.

  Therefore, Ranjeet and Jeanine want to see the city rising up from the depleted water table, they want to see the shimmering mirages of Las Vegas, or at least this is what Ranjeet says. Jeanine is no longer sure. She’s beginning to think that having staked her future on a foreign national who only a few weeks ago was driving for a car service in Brooklyn may have been a bit hasty, especially because Ranjeet persists in believing that he’s going to direct both the big three-hour first episode of The Diviners and the spectacular Las Vegas episode, a.k.a. episode thirteen.

  Ranjeet has gone native. He doesn’t run his plans by Vanessa or Madison or anyone else. He doesn’t care about Means of Production or its legacy. He orders Jeanine around, implying that she doesn’t know about her own culture. He says that if the Liberace Museum is not, as she sees it, an absolute necessity for their trip, then she should not have accompanied him. He especially wants to see the capes. And so Jeanine has become the woman behind the megalomaniac. She can arrange many things according to instructions. She can book flights, like the flight into Salt Lake, where they went briefly to see the temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She can insist on a larger car, which is a dusty Mustang convertible, by which conveyance they are approaching Las Vegas. She can secure hotel rooms. And she can listen to the strophes, as he calls them, when they overcome him, his songs about the plenitude of jerky in truck stops off the interstate, about the poisonous American coffee of these wastelands. Is the foulness of the coffee in Elko a test for the immigrants who have come to this New World? And what about the women painted on the mud flaps of the rigs that they pass? Ranjeet sings of all these things.

  He has somehow swindled the rental car through someone at UBC. She doesn’t even want to know. He is on his cell phone all the time now, and she overhears more of his conversations than she has conversations with him. Maybe he is dictating the strophes into some answering machine someplace. He seems to believe that the appearance of cell phone use is a necessary part of his job. “There is no actual city here, no actual place, no content of any kind, that was why this was the perfect locale for Benjamin Siegel, also known as Bugsy
. Because if a place has nothing in it but mirages, then any kind of fantasy may be built upon this place, and the economy of such a city is composed of the ephemeral nature of fantasies and the massaging of fantasies into the possibility of gratification. It is a very fine word, gaming, because it implies that there is a complete elimination of serious endeavor.” They streak past another billboard: Topless girls! One hundred miles!

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” she shouts, as he barks into the cell phone.

  “I would like to hear what you have to say when I am done with this particular call.”

  They are looking for the Spanish Trail. They’re looking for where the caravan of Mexican trader Antonio Armijo might have traveled in 1829. This would be a very good place to film any desert sequences. To film in the actual place of this caravan will bring a much-needed legitimacy to the project, especially as Antonio Armijo is himself a character in episode thirteen. They can hire the specialists they need, the gaffers and grips, the assistant directors, the second unit, in the Las Vegas area, which now boasts professional crews and a city department of film projects, just as with any thriving metropolitan center. There will be a reverse caravan of professionals to this desolate spot along the Spanish Trail, which could also be ideal for any featurette about the making of The Diviners.

  They have passed through towns called Death and Devil’s Paintbrush, and they have seen expanses of craggy mountains and empty valleys, and it all looks the same; it all looks like a canvas on which the developers have not yet daubed their computer-aided pastels, and yet, at a certain moment on the interstate, which could as well be anywhere, Ranjeet cries, “We must stop!” He pulls the car off the highway, muttering about the geological survey of the Bureau of Land Management. It is right, he says, that he should be able to drive his rented vehicle wherever he should choose to drive it, through Russian thistle and mesquite. That is the great democratic principle. The convertible, which, rented at a luxury rate, is not designed for this kind of punishment, kicks up storms of dust as they streak into the midst of Ranjeet’s folly. They move out of the range of the cellular telephone, away from its roadside comforts, and Jeanine feels herself cradled in the emptiness of this place. Ranjeet presses on, thundering over the tracks of an all-terrain vehicle, until they can no longer see the interstate, and its hum sounds like a signal from interstellar space. Finally, Ranjeet says, “Here.” He’s out of the car before she has even registered that they are parked. Ranjeet scampers into the desert and falls to his knees.