The video was shot by several Berkley journalism students, originally for their campus TV station. They had recently uploaded the segment onto YouTube. They interviewed Gunderson about the globes, the bomb threat, and the campus lockdown.
From what Rick could guess, the professor of engineering had been rattled pretty badly by the incident. The one-time voice of reason and advocate for measured, cautious scientific investigation now sounded like a demented loon. The man who only a day ago might have scoffed at the sort of rococo conspiracy theories Bill Canyon had regaled Cornelia with was now spinning his own yarn about a global cabal of fundamentalist religious fanatics concocting the globe “hoax” to destroy science.
“So there’s a logical explanation, you mean?” a very youthful male voice came from off camera.
Gunderson’s head snapped to his right. He threw a furtive glance out the window behind him. The interview might have been taking place in his office on the Berkeley campus. Nonetheless, Gunderson looked painfully ill at ease being there. Although the news had reported that the bomb scare was a hoax, perhaps, Rick thought, Gunderson was afraid of the “bombers” coming back and this time trying to kill him for real.
“I guess,” Gunderson said, glancing out the window again. He had the unpleasant look of a terrified animal caught in a trap frozen onto his face. “I mean, there absolutely has to be,” he said, his gaze darting back toward the camera. “No doubt about it.”
“So what is it?” the student asked very calmly. Perhaps he, too, was getting worried about the professor’s unhinged behavior.
Gunderson shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”
Although Rick had at first been angry to see this video—Gunderson promised the Confirmation team an interview first—he was starting to feel fortunate that they were not the ones having to deal with this scattershot meltdown.
“Well, Professor,” said the interviewer, “Whoever is behind this somehow managed to pull off the greatest hoax in the history of the world, right? If it is a hoax.”
Gunderson’s eyebrows knitted together. “But of course it’s a hoax.”
“As a professor of engineering, how do you think the hoax was done?”
Gunderson continued glaring at the camera without answering.
“I mean,” the kid behind the camera said, his voice sort of tentative now. “Many other people have tried to guess how it was done, but no one could explain it yet. As an expert in engineering, how would you say the hoaxers pulled it off?”
Rick thought the students had been asking good questions so far. Now he hoped they wouldn’t let the esteemed expert intimidate them into softball questions.
“I don’t know how it was done,” Gunderson said, a peevish, defensive edge to his voice. “Whoever did this must have spent enormous amounts of money on his—or their!—scheme.”
How much money would it take to place dozens of these globes all over the world, you jackass? Rick wanted to yell at the screen.
“But what I do know,” said Gunderson, “is the sort of insidious, dangerous effect it’s had on the world.”
“Can you talk about that?” the interviewer asked.
“We’re just about on the verge of a holy war breaking out because of Islamic fanatics. We’ve had death threats against science professors. Bomb scares! I heard of a story where a man undergoing cancer treatment snuck out of the hospital to try and find one of the globes. He thought aliens were about to land, cure him, and fly him off to some sort of a paradise on the moons of Jupiter. Is that dangerous enough for you?”
“I think, Professor, that the process—you know, the mechanics of making these globes and putting them in the middle of a crowded city like they did here in San Francisco—just seems impossible to hoax.”
That was a great point the kid made, Rick thought.
“At one time people thought crop circles were impossible to hoax.”
That’s not an answer, you asshole, Rick thought. Come on, kid, you have to follow up if you ever want a job in the big leagues.
“Well then, how are they doing all this?”
Rick was grinning now.
And then he would have sworn to God that he actually felt Cornelia’s eyes on him. His eyes turned to her and, sure enough, she was glaring at him.
“I’ll explain later,” he whispered.
“Can’t that wait at all?” she hissed more than whispered her reply. “Just a few more minutes, for Christ’s sake?”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t know how they’re doing it,” Gunderson said. “But what’s more important is what’s happening. What this is doing to our world. People turning against each other. People turning against science and embracing all kinds of absurd, irrational, unprovable nonsense.”
Of course, Rick considered, Gunderson himself was now making the same demand of his audience. He expected them to accept an unproven—and perhaps unprovable—assertion. Neither he nor any of the other militant skeptics could offer any plausible explanation for the origin of the globes. Sure, many of them made probabilistic arguments, claiming that the globes had to be made by an earthly source because there was no believable evidence to suggest that the supernatural existed. There was no evidence—or at least no evidence people like Gunderson or Pike or their likeminded colleagues accepted—that UFOs or ghosts or demons or elemental earth spirits were real. Thus, in all probability, whatever was behind the globes had to be something mundane. Like a hoax.
It reminded Rick of a sculptor in Vermont who also believed that the entire phenomenon was an epic, world-wide hoax. To prove his point, he went to work carving an exact replica of one of the mystery globes. In several interviews he gave during his project, he kept espousing the tenets of Occam’s Razor to get his audiences to accept his hoax theory. All things being equal, Occam’s Razor argues, the simplest solution to any problem is bound to be the correct solution. If he could replicate the stone globe, the sculptor argued ever more vehemently in each subsequent interview, then Occam’s Razor held and the most logical explanation for the phenomenon was a hoax.
Except the sculptor’s argument in this case was a bastardization of Occam’s Razor. And replication did not necessarily mean a valid alternative explanation. That the globes had to be a part of a hoax because the sculptor could reproduce them was an erroneous argument. There were hundreds of conspiracy nuts all over the Internet, after all, who claimed that the moon landings could be perfectly replicated on sound stages on Earth. Certainly such replication was possible, but that did not mean that there was any serious reason to believe that the moon landings were government-orchestrated hoaxes. So, unless that sculptor could knock out dozens of globes in his home studio and deposit them in the middle of busy streets without anyone noticing, his argument had no weight.
And Gunderson’s hoax rants rang just as hollow.
Except, Rick thought, the crazy bastard does make one great point. What all of this is doing to the world is getting more and more disturbing.
“So what was so important that it couldn’t wait another minute?” Cornelia said, and nudged Rick.
He noticed people getting out of their seats now. He had been so focused on the video on his phone that he didn’t even realize the service had come to an end. Sarah’s casket was being lowered into the ground.
Rick quickly yanked the headphones from his ear and shoved the phone into his pocket. “It was Marcus Gunderson. He gave an interview to a couple of journalism students instead of us.”
“I’m sure we can get something from him as well,” Cornelia said as they got to their feet. “We’re not airing our interviews immediately, after all.”
“Yeah, you’re right. And besides, Gunderson seems to have slipped the tracks.”
“What?”
“I think that bomb threat freaked him out too much. He sounded like a raving nut.”
“How bad did he—?”
“Look, never mind,” Rick cut her off as he scanned the funeral crowd. “You know, what I’m wondering about is how did that pastor manage to get set up to conduct the service here.”
Cornelia shrugged. “I don’t know. Pastor Prouty, was it…?”
“No, that wasn’t Prouty. Remember what one of the people said when we got here?”
“No.”
“Prouty had taken ill. But look, you said that Sarah was not very religious, and back at the hospital the other day the colonel certainly didn’t sound like the type who was looking at all this like some great divine message or sign or something.”
Cornelia didn’t reply immediately, apparently mulling over the issue. “I’m not sure,” she said at length. “Maybe it was Sarah’s mother’s wish. Or her brother, Jeff. He’s in the air force, too.”
“That would explain it,” Rick said, looking around, hoping they could just drift away from the funeral but knowing full well they couldn’t yet go anywhere. There was still work to be done here. They had to keep documenting the event. They needed to capture the human drama. They had to ask people questions on camera.
“Why?” Cornelia asked. “What’s the problem?”
“It’s just that I’m not in the mood for an old family reunion, that’s all.”
But it was too late for that, Rick realized, noticing the familiar face from across the crowd.
“Reunion?” But Cornelia caught herself. “You don’t mean….”
“Yes, I do mean. The man we just listened to doing the service, Pastor Burke, just happens to be married to my ex-wife. And now I think they might say hello.”
2.
At that moment, more than anything in the world, Rick wished that conspiracy-theory crackpot, Bill Canyon, could have been at the funeral services. Rick would have loved to have smacked him in the face and asked him if he still believed that there were no coincidences in the world.
Now the wildest coincidence stood right in front of him. His ex-wife, Lindsay, had come over to say a polite “hello” to Rick and to wish him well on his reality-show.
“So you’re still sticking with show biz,” Lindsay said her in usual soft, mellifluous delivery, a placid, beatific smile on her face. With that voice and that smile, Rick used to joke that she should have been cast as Mr. Roger’s granddaughter and PBS could have kept its children’s show going as Ms. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Lindsay used to find it funny for a while, but once her regrets over having abandoned her acting aspirations turned into a festering resentment, she had taken to cutting Rick’s comparison off with a sharp “Would you give that idiotic joke a rest already?”
“That’s very interesting,” she added a beat later.
Years ago those comments would have ignited one of their fights. Rick would have interpreted it as one of her accusations of infidelity, an accusation rooted in her disdain for Los Angeles and her resentment that he did not want to leave the city. Their problems had started with Rick’s first brush with filmmaking, well before Wilt Kamen and two years into their marriage. Rick and several other patrolmen at his station had been approached to serve as extras on a film shooting in and around Santa Monica. Soon after their scenes started filming, however, they were given a few short lines to speak. The director liked to fancy himself as being “edgy.” He usually cast a lot of cops and ex-cons in his films for authenticity. Rick’s enjoyment of the experience, though, turned into a corrosive drop of poison in his and Lindsay’s relationship.
Lindsay had been a drama and English double major at Tulane University, and moved to Los Angeles to try her hand at stardom after college. Less than a year later she was disillusioned with the brutal competition in the business and quit. She went back to earn a teaching certification from Cal State Fresno, and started a new career teaching English and social studies in a Tarzana elementary school.
Rick and Lindsay had started dating after being introduced by his first partner’s wife. Louie and Elise DeFalco had a daughter in Lindsay’s English class, and they met her at one of the parent-teacher conferences. Elise had often recalled how she took one look at the pretty young teacher and felt a “vibe” about her being right for Rick. Elise also usually swore up and down that she wasn’t the “typical kooky new age type.” But Rick and Lindsay had hit it off perfectly on their first date, and four months later they were engaged.
Shortly after they met, though, Rick sensed that Lindsay regretted giving up her acting aspirations too soon. But, he reasoned, was there really anyone out there who didn’t regret not going after at least one outlandish dream? He didn’t suspect, however, how regret tended to metastasize into bitterness in some people.
“It’s a good gig,” Rick said, making the effort to sound as mellow as he could. Although seeing the Gunderson interview had irritated him just enough to want to add “So by interesting you mean you’re regretting not sticking around a little bit longer?” He also would have loved to have added, “And was that vague email from you last month official notice that your lawyer was no longer suing me for that one missed alimony check from three years ago, from before you and Pastor Don were married?” “So how come your husband’s taking part in this?” he asked instead.
“Donald’s a friend of Pastor Prouty, who’s not feeling well.”
“That’s too bad,” Rick replied, still stunned by the fact that Lindsay and her husband had ended up in the San Francisco area, and the coincidence behind their brush with the globe phenomenon. “Do you know Sarah?”
“Not personally, no.”
“She was a friend of Cornelia’s. That’s one of my cohosts.”
“Oh, I know,” Lindsay said with another one of her thin, enigmatic hints of a smile. “Small world, right? You looked very close back there. Are you…?”
Rick almost couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His blood pressure spiked. “What?” he said as evenly as he could.
“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said, her smile more obvious this time, looking reconciliatory, apologetic. “Never mind, OK?”
Rick, though, could mind, no matter how much his better nature told him it was childish to keep dwelling on old slights. They had, after all, allowed their marriage to fall apart. But it frustrated him to realize that this line of dialogue was exactly like all the ones that had led to their explosive fights and sullen, sulking resentment of each other.
The fact was that in Los Angeles it could be hard to avoid the intrusion of show business into their lives. Besides of the gig as the speaking extra, Rick had also done several moonlighting stints on security jobs for film sets and at celebrity parties. Lindsay at first didn’t want to know anything about the details, then conducted interrogations of Rick, wanting to know whether any women were hitting on him and how many women he talked to at the parties. The trouble in the marriage became obvious, and had come to the forefront of their everyday lives when Rick confronted her with a question about her insecurity. Was she really taking her regrets out on him? Was she unhappy with her life because she didn’t have enough courage and fortitude to pursue her acting career?
But now Rick knew there was no point in going back to old, frustrating territory. There was information he needed from Lindsay, and he needed to concentrate on the job. “Look, what I’m wondering about is this ceremony. From what I understood, Sarah was not very…you know, very religious.”
And he was but deluding himself, he knew, the moment the words came out of his mouth, if he thought this conversation was going to go anywhere other than back to old, painful places.
“Her brother, Jeff, requested it,” Lindsay said.
As she did so, Rick’s gaze had already darted away for a couple of moments. He was searching for sight of her husband. That, too, Rick knew, was but some self-destructive impulse right now. He’d already had to listen to the man deliver the service. If Rick would see the Pastor Donald
Burke anywhere nearby, he would get the old urges to slug him into insensibility.
“He knows Pastor Prouty.” Lindsay’s voice disrupted that vicious little thought slithering through his mind. “Jeff has been saved, and I guess he was able to persuade their father to listen to what Pastor Prouty and Don have to say about these globes.”
Adrenaline surged through Rick now. “Oh?”
“That they’re a danger. They’re evil. My God, who would have thought Armageddon would be ushered in like this.”
Try as he might, Rick was unable to separate the business at hand from their past. Maybe he had been a fool to think for even a moment that it was possible. It was Lindsay’s “salvation” at the hands of the Pastor Burke that had ended their marriage, after all.
Lindsay, in her own way, was exactly like so many of the directionless, wannabe starlets, despite the fact that she had stopped pursuing roles less than a year after moving to L.A. She had gone through several phases while they were together. It appeared to be clear to Rick now in hindsight. Although Lindsay had stopped auditioning, she, too, had still quested to find an identity for herself. The first identity she had tried on was that of the dedicated educator. It was quite attractive, Rick had thought at the time, and told her often. He thought he was convincing when he said that he found an idealistic teacher more attractive than a glamorous TV or movie star. Nonetheless, the problem, Rick thought now, was that Lindsay hadn’t become the teacher entirely out of idealism. She quit trying to make it as an actress because she had been intimidated by the business, and she reinvented herself as the first convenient thing she could think of.
Then Rick’s brushes with Hollywood came and Lindsay’s insecurities and regrets were unleashed. At that point, her feminist phase started and lasted very briefly. She had enrolled in a teacher-education program at a community college, taking a course in how to teach the critical examination of pop culture. As Rick recalled her “media literacy” textbooks, the course seemed to blame everything but earthquakes on TV and advertising. She realized, she had said, that her acting career never really took off because she didn’t have the right body type demanded by all the misogynistic male casting agents.
Confirmation Page 12
