“Don’t misunderstand me,” she continued. “I’m not singling you out. Most corporations are just as culpable, and governments are no different – a society in fear is the easiest society to control – and let’s not get started on institutionalized religion, either.” Before she went on, another underground quake rattled the chinaware and shook the miniature figurines on top of the piano. “I had hoped with everything that’s been said, you would’ve put aside your prejudice and decided to join us by now,” she said, as the shaking and rumbles died away. “We want you, and we need you, to fulfill your role – to fulfill your prophesized destiny – but we can’t force you to do something you don’t want to do. We can’t put a gun to your head; you’re already dead. We can’t extort you; you have no money. As far as kidnapping your wife and using her as leverage, if she’s even in LeMont, I don’t think that would work either, do you?”
Louis shrugged, figuring she couldn’t be more goddamn right than Ronald Reagan. The Freedom Fighters had nothing over him. He could walk out of here on his own free will and do what he damn well pleased. But the voice of Lady Di thought otherwise. And do just what, Louis dear? I’m sure the secret police would love to hear your version of the Freedom Fighter’s plan; and when you’ve finished, why, they’ll let you go as free as a rabbit. They might even help you get settled in a nice apartment just off the piazza…
All right, all right, he got the picture, he said to the voice. It was so clear he had to stop himself looking over his shoulder to see if she was there. She wasn’t, he didn’t need to look to know that, some part of his subconscious was masquerading as his (ex?) wife. Probably that part where his so-called morals were hidden, popping up to annoy him whenever it suited. No goddamn wonder it sounded like Lady Di.
“In fact, forcing you against your will would defeat the whole purpose,” The Master added. “We’d play straight into The Boss’s hands. We need you to come willingly, no strings attached. It’s the only way the plan will work.”
Louis wasn’t really listening, his thoughts on something The Master had just said: if she’s even in LeMont. Lady Di’s whereabouts raised some immediate questions. If, in fact, she was somewhere in the underground mega-city, what kind of spirit-animal would he have to be on the lookout for? A jackal? A lizard? Unlikely. So too a rat or guinea pig. Probably a goddamn mouse, like the one he was staring at across the coffee table. An interesting theory, except for one thing: Lady Di wouldn’t be seen dead in a dress that resembled a goddamn straight jacket; she would be in leg warmers and leotards and down at the salon having her hair and nails (claws?) done. Maybe he was onto something there. Maybe searching for her would be as easy as checking out every hair salon in LeMont. It would only be a matter of time before he stumbled upon her, and he had all the time in the world, didn’t he?
The Master’s voice snapped him back. “When the sky-vault collapses with The Tower, everyone will see that The Boss doesn’t have supreme power over everything, most of all themselves. That’s where you come in.” The Master waited for his reply, then, sensing his unease, quoted a now familiar line: “When The Tower does fall, He will come.”
“Inviting you to follow,” Louis said, beginning to hate Miles N. Boon and his goddamn prophecy. Although he suspected – no, he goddamn knew – what the Freedom Fighters wanted him to do, he was still clinging onto the hope that he might somehow be wrong. He eyed the marching guinea pig, hoping for support, but none was forthcoming. Directing himself to The Master, he said, “You want me to be the goddamn Pied Piper of LeMont. Lead six billion down Conduit Number 1 and over the precipice into oblivion. Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
Without breaking stride, Frank O’Lynn said, “No more crazy than a city of six billion under the control of one corporation.”
Louis clenched his teeth. Just because a shepherd jumped over the cliff, it didn’t mean the sheep would follow. “There’s just too many variables, too many things that can go wrong. It’s just not feasible.”
“The plan has already entered the final phase,” The Master said, and Louis’ thoughts flashed to the increasingly frequent underground rumblings. “There’s no turning back. We either do it with you, or without you.”
Louis was no psychotherapist, but he knew as well as anybody that if someone had it in their head to commit suicide, then no amount of logic was going to make a goddamn bit of difference. He could sit here till the cows came home, a lot of good it would achieve; The Master and her Freedom Fighters were going to do what they were going to do. He gave it one last shot, however. “How can you be so sure The Boss hasn’t infiltrated the Freedom Fighters? What if he already knows your plans? What if he’s just waiting to ambush you when you make your move, finish off your resistance once and for all?”
The Master said, “The Boss has known about our plan since the very beginning.”
Louis bolted upright, making only a pathetic gasping noise in reply. His tie felt like a noose that had been yanked tight around his neck, as though he had just been hoisted onto the gallows and left to dangle. The Boss goddamn knew?
“The Tower’s strength is also its weakness,” The Master added. “He thinks The Tower is an infallible fortress, that we are weak, that we are doomed to failure. He allows us to try what we can because it gives him the very excuse he needs to tighten the reins over his citizens, to have even more power. It allows him to enact laws that take away our basic rights. It allows him to pry into our own personal lives, to have anyone he sees as a threat, innocent or not, detained without trial in the chambers along Conduit Number 1. In a way, he uses us to suit his own agenda, but his arrogance will be his downfall.”
Any inkling that Louis might have entertained regarding the success of the Freedom Fighter’s plans was now well and truly scrapped. They were walking into the lion’s den, of that he had no doubt. Nothing bar a miracle was going to stop The Boss chewing them up and spitting them out, and his first instinct was overwhelming and immediate. Run. Save his own pelt. Get the hell out of here, fast. But where could he go? Either direction he faced – going along with the Freedom Fighters, hiding, or turning himself in to the peelers – was a goddamn dead end.
“There’s still one thing I don’t quite get,” he said. “Why do you really need me? You’re The Master, surely you could do a better job.”
“You’re forgetting one important factor: you’ve seen the White Rabbit, I haven’t. You’re the prophet, chosen to lead us out of the darkness and into the light. You must lead by example. You must be the first to step through the archway.”
“But they won’t believe me. Everyone already thinks I’m suffering from Post Traumatic Death Syndrome. There’s no way they’ll follow a madman.”
Frank O’Lynn, halfway back from the doorway, opened his jaw to say what was on his mind, but The Master spoke before he could even taken the next step. “They will follow if you come back and show them that there’s nothing to fear.”
“What are you goddamn talking about? Come back from where?”
“Where else do you think?” The Master said. “From obliteration.”
Her words suddenly took Louis back to his childhood, to the time during and after the war (the big one, the one that nearly shook the world off its goddamn axis). He was reminded in particular of the hard wooden pews and butt-numbing sermons at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, his mother’s doing of course. Without fail every week, she would drag him along and force him to sit through mass, including twice at Christmas, three times at Easter, not to mention all the weddings, christenings and funerals that never seemed to end. It was a goddamn production line – in went the newborns, all dressed up in frilly frocks, and out went the old ones, packaged up and shifted out in wooden boxes. Never mind butt numbing, it was goddamn mind numbing.
Not surprisingly, his father never attended, not once in Louis’ memory, not even when his only sister finally succumbed to the ravages of polio that had sentenced her to a life in splints and crutches since she was
three. “The born-again atheist,” he called himself whenever his wife began the ritual of asking whether he would be attending this week (though Louis suspected she was always glad to hear him refuse), “I only worship the trinity of Beer, Wine and the holy Spirits,” and if Louis ever so much as chuckled he would receive a clip around the ears, followed by a stern warning that if he kept that attitude up he would be following his father all the way to the gates of hell.
Louis didn’t care; he had long suspected his father was onto something Father Gringham and the nuns at St. Patrick’s had no idea about, getting what you could out of life while you were still here. At age ten, in a desperate attempt to avoid another morning of utter boredom, Louis summoned the courage to use his father’s tried and tested excuse, which he thought infallible. “I’m a born-again atheist,” he said to his mother through the bedroom door. “I can’t go to church anymore.”
Margaret DeVille had burst into the bedroom and had him into his Sunday bests before he even knew what hit him. Which she had, a slap across his face that left a large ruby imprint down the side of his left cheek, along with a puffy eye though which he had to squint for the rest of the day. Injuries that he had to confess to Sister Brady at Sunday school were the result of sleepwalking into the bathroom door the night before. “The devil loves an idle mind,” the nun said, slapping his wrist. “Let that be a lesson for you.”
He received many such lessons from Sister Brady over the years, more than he cared to remember. By the time the GI’s had trickled home from Europe and the Pacific, Louis had well and truly had the Fear of God beaten into him. Pain and suffering, he came to realize, were part and parcel of being a good Catholic boy. Which was probably why he wasn’t a good Catholic boy; he was an extraordinarily bad one. He was the last in class to recite the Lord’s Prayer by heart. He was constantly overlooked as an altar boy, to his mother’s enduring shame. He was never asked to try out for the choir, and he could never for the life of him remember the stories in the Old Testament. The whole genealogy was too goddamn confusing. Everyone was begatting everyone, and he never did work out if Kane killed Abel, or Abel killed Kane? Ask him now, and he reckoned he still wouldn’t be able to tell you who was whose brother’s keeper. Noah was the guy on the boat with all the animals, at least he knew that, but who the hell was Jacob and Abraham, and why did one of them want to sacrifice his only son instead of a goat? Moses was probably the character he found easiest to remember. Good ol’ basket baby was given the dos and don’ts of God on top of the mountain in the desert; but apart from Thou Shall Not Kill, could anyone really list the whole Ten Commandments, and in goddamn order?
Nah, the whole damn thing was just too confusing. Too many things to remember. Too many contradictions. He liked simplicity, and simplicity was anathema to the Catholic Church. It thrived on confusion. The whole institution seemed to be based on the maxim, “God gives with one hand, and takes with the other,” and he had often thought of it as an army nurse who deliberately poisoned her soldiers so that she could keep caring for them. He certainly had his battle wounds, embarrassment and disgrace (You’re not worthy of God’s Love, Master DeVille), things he had spent his whole adult life trying to forget; but no scar ever completely healed, did it? Old war veterans, diabetics, chain smokers, anyone in fact who had lost a leg or arm, invariably complained of feelings coming from the limb that no longer existed, pins and needles, twitches, even cramps. Phantom limb pain, the docs called it. Memories were like that. No matter how hard someone tried to lobotomize a piece of history from their mind, there was always a reminder of what had happened, a flash of recollected pain, a grimace of lingering humiliation. Once in, they were always part of you.
One Sunday school memory in particular kept haunting him like a phantom limb. On his way home in the back of a taxi, chairing a boardroom meeting, relaxing in front of the TV, it would ambush him out of the blue just when his defenses were at their lowest. Like now, with The Master and The Partridge in a basement apartment that was shaking with another underground quake. The memory had hardly changed over the years, a little dog-eared at the edges some would say, but the picture was essentially the same: Sister Brady in front of a class of fifty or so kids that were grouped together like POWs on the carpet. She had a pointer stick she carried everywhere, with which she would slap down on any unsuspecting wrist. The kids cringed every time she came near them. Man, it would sting. “God’s little corrector,” she called it. The kids baptized it something else, “Brady’s bayonet,” though later he would come to remember it more as miniature whip.
“Louis DeVille,” she said, spinning on her flat heels and making him jump with a start. She always called him Lewis – Loo-iss-Da-Veal – not Lewey, her thick Mississippi accent hissing straight from the back of her nose. “What would you have done in the same circumstance?”
Unfortunately, Louis had arrived late to class. His tardiness, not for the first time, made him an easy target. Not only did he have to sit in the only available location, right at the front, it also meant Sister Brady had all the excuses in the world to make a fool of him. He could sense the other kids fidgeting around him, grateful that her attention wasn’t trained upon them and yet fearful for what was about to happen to one of their own. Louis, for the time being, was caught in a no-win situation. Whatever he said would probably land him with a stinging wrist. So he decided to say nothing.
“Before you decided to grace us with your presence,” she said, speaking above him to the rest of the class, “we were discussing the prophet Moses, and the predicament in which he found himself whilst leading the Jews out of Egypt.” She flexed the pointer like she was trying to snap a twig in half, and Louis instinctively sat on his hands. “The Pharaoh’s army was hot on his heels. The Red Sea was in front of him. There was nowhere to go. The situation was hopeless.” She paced back and forth, still flexing the pointer. “So, Master DeVille, if you were in Moses’ sandals, what would you have done?”
Louis knew silence would only save him for so long, so he said the first thing that came to mind. “Run away.”
He hadn’t meant to be funny, but the rest of the class burst out laughing. He glanced over his shoulder, unable to stop himself smiling with everyone else. When he looked back, Sister Brady was flexing the pointer so hard it was now almost in the shape of an upside down horseshoe. “Give me your hand,” she said.
The laughter immediately stopped. Louis hesitated, torn between outright refusal and submission.
“Give me your hand or it will be your backside, right here, in front of the class.”
He heard a few nervous giggles behind him, boys and girls, then held his hand forward. The sting on his knuckles made him flinch and brought a tear to his eye. He absolutely refused to cry, hugging his aching hand to his chest while Sister Brady went back to where she had left off.
“It’s a good thing God didn’t choose you to lead the Jews out of Egypt, isn’t it?” she said. Louis nodded several short jerks of his head, not meeting her eye. “The Lord chose a man with faith, a man who wouldn’t run away from his responsibilities. Can anybody tell me what Moses really did?”
Louis heard a boy behind him say, “He parted the Red Sea, ma’m.”
“Correct. But what did he do before that?”
A girl answered this time. “He prayed to God for help, ma’m.”
“Precisely, and God didn’t let him down, did He? He saved the Jews and killed the Pharaoh’s army. His Will was done.”
Absently rubbing his paw, Louis glanced up at The Master, half-expecting her to lean across the coffee table and slap him on the paw. The sternness of her posture in particular reminded him of Sister Brady, but that was as far as the similarities went, and as far as he wanted to think about her. He wondered what had triggered the memory, then recalled what The Master had been saying immediately beforehand, letting his mind wander to what she was really asking: for him to lead the Freedom Fighters out of LeMont (and here’s the goddamn kicker, Louis my
boy, through the archway at the end of Conduit Number 1). Easier said than goddamn done. But if that wasn’t frightening enough, he had to prove the Fires of Oblivion were no barrier by coming back. Where the hell did she get this insanity?
Delusions of grandeur aside, he couldn’t go through with it. No matter how much his ego was impressed with the idea of being a hero, this was an impasse of Moses-like proportions. Probably even bigger, Lazarus like, and if it came to the crunch, if he had no other option than to step blindly into the unknown, he knew deep down that he would falter. Sister Brady had been right all along. He simply didn’t have what it took.
Goddamn faith.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Art Of Zipping
“LOUIS! Louis!” Frank O’Lynn said, shaking his shoulders.
With the guinea pig’s face barely inches from his own, Louis peeled himself from the mental brick wall into which he had slammed. Frank O’Lynn released his grip and stepped back, eyeing him with concern. “You okay? You looked gone. I thought we’d lost you.”
“I’m still here,” he said. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”
Frank O’Lynn retreated behind the coffee table to where Louis last remembered him, halfway between the piano and the door. “To be sure, you were unresponsive for quite a while. You sure you’re okay?”
Louis figured he looked as bad as he was feeling. He was just so goddamn tired. His head felt like a sack of cement on his shoulders. “What do you mean? How long was I out?”
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