The Diviners (72 page)

Because the location of the shooting expedition was outdoors in a rather rustic part of the state of Maryland, there were about them some examples of what remained there of wildlife, the few species that had not yet properly come under man’s dominion. There were a few buffleheads, and there were a few cormorants and other such waterbirds, and there were a few geese. Canada geese, in particular. On a number of occasions, the special chum was heard to exclaim that these birds were pestilential, and he used a number of obscene epithets for the geese, and he noted that when he was a child, these geese were given to leave droppings on the lawn of his summer home, on the windward side of Cape Cod. Goose droppings, the special chum remarked; horrible. You’d go out there in the morning, you’d better be sure to wear Wellingtons if you didn’t want to step in the mounds. The birds were unfriendly, too, the special chum observed, always trying to run the children off the estate. The distinguished jurist took pause here, since he could not help but notice that the special chum’s dream of a Cape Cod childhood was at variance with some of what he knew of the special chum’s curriculum vitae. The special chum during his time in Hollywood had apparently gerrymandered the locale of the story, because the special chum was, by virtue of his religion, occasionally picked on as a lad, and this was something that on the most drunken nights in law school the special chum would share with the distinguished jurist, calling him by his diminutive name, saying that they understood each other because they were here at the law school at a time when the scions of Protestant legacy would not have any truck with them. They had each overcome the prejudices of the nation, the special chum indicated back in law school, and yet, out in the marshlands, with his gun loaded, the special chum, as if he had something to prove about the rumors that the distinguished jurist had heard about him, had felt a need to seem other than what he was, that is, a person whose summers had taken place in Mamaroneck, by the Long Island Sound.

Accordingly, what happened next was perhaps natural. It was perhaps part of the natural order that the special chum should call “Pull,” that the clay pigeon should rise up into the sky like a tiny emblem for Apollo making his journey across the day. And yet, just when the special chum might have fired on the clay pigeon, he instead turned the barrel of the gun in another direction. Both the distinguished jurist and the young man operating the slingshot for the clay pigeons ducked, flattened themselves, and there was a pause and a pathetic squawk as the shot perforated the hide of one of the Canada geese settled nearby beside some brush. The other geese reared up, astonished, and the whole of the gaggle took flight, except for one, who remained behind momentarily, looking, no doubt, at its now mortally aerated mate. Then this bird, too, lifted off. There was a silence as the special chum took all this in, the fact that he had finally hit something. Then he ejected his cartridge.

“Fifty years of irritation rectified,” said the special chum.

Their rod and gun club guide mumbled something about how they were definitely pests and needed to be shown a thing or two, or that’s how the distinguished jurist remembers it. The rest of the day, no more than three quarters of an hour, passed in uncomfortable silence.

Though there was an aggrieved apology, next day, when the distinguished jurist reached his chambers, a little handwritten note about the nature of sportsmanship and how the special chum, by his own reckoning, had failed the test of sportsmanship (and would the distinguished jurist please accept this gift in his name to Ducks Unlimited in the amount of et cetera, et cetera), the distinguished jurist found the event, the dispatching of the goose, unsettling, distasteful, and so further years passed without much consort between the two friends.

However, one finds that old friends are gilded by the lateness of the hour, the headlong rush to the beyond. We are thrown into this life to fend for ourselves, and everywhere there are disappointments and conspiracies that can drive us from our charted course. We are only given a few bosom mates. No lapse in judgment should separate us—for whose slate is without its chalk marks?—and though the distinguished jurist has spoken out to any number of groups against the love that dare not speak its name and how its pleas for special rights must be repelled—notwithstanding these things, the distinguished jurist always did like the special chum. Though the special chum is thicker around the waist now, and though his blue eyes have dimmed, and though he is craggy and not the rake he once was, the distinguished jurist feels that he will not give up on the amity of long lives lived together. Such is loyalty.

In fact, this is what he is thinking as he waits at security in the rear of the building, when the special chum arrives and passes through the metal detector.

“Good buddy!” says Naz Korngold.

“Special friend!” says the distinguished jurist.

The two hug. The distinguished jurist takes in the outfit, the pleated pants, the silk shirt, the sport coat.

“You are looking especially natty,” he says to his old friend.

“You’re hale as ever,” says the special chum. “I was expecting you’d look like you’d got no sleep in the last couple of weeks. But you look ready for combat!” Here the special chum smacks the distinguished jurist on the shoulder, as he might have done forty years ago. It feels only a little forced.

Then the special chum takes pause and gazes down the length of the corridor where they stand, which, because it is a Sunday, and because the special chum has entered from the back, looks like a public office building anywhere in the District of Columbia.

“They spend the redecorating budget upstairs,” the distinguished jurist offers, meaning the courtroom itself, with its opulent swags of drapery and its allegorical murals.

“But this is where it all happens,” says Naz Korngold.

The distinguished jurist prides himself on a spotless office. The piles of briefs and memos are tidied up and put in their particular areas, and at the end of each day the distinguished jurist insists that Mrs. Edith Wilbur should clear off his desk in its entirety, because he cannot think properly with his desk covered in papers. This is the condition of his desk when he enters with the special chum. Mrs. Edith Wilbur enters behind them, to make sure they have everything they need. The distinguished jurist sends her away. Next, the particularly sycophantic clerk also tries to stop in for an introduction, no doubt recognizing the special chum from photographs, but the distinguished jurist also sends the sycophantic clerk packing, telling him that there are some capital cases that must be dispatched. At last, the distinguished jurist points to the empty chair by the desk and then he indicates the table across the room, where there await two steaks, two salads, some French bread, and a bottle of
vin ordinaire,
procured especially for them.

“Pull up your chair,” the distinguished jurist says. “Lend me your troubles.”

The special chum says, “I’m grateful to you for taking the time when you have so much before you. And, of course, I don’t expect you to compromise the extraordinary sensitivity of your office.”

The distinguished jurist uncorks the bottle of wine with a flourish.

“The situation is this.” The special chum drinks from the proffered glass. “As you probably know, our stock is plummeting badly. Getting hammered, in fact. Since the beginning of the year. There’s dissent at the board level. Certain persons are attempting to infiltrate the board. People who are not loyal. I’ve tried doing what I can, cost-cutting, downsizing, diversifying. You may have heard about our new —”

“The Interstate —”

“First-rate product. My acquisitions are in the name of making the core business sturdy, as you know. So that we can weather the downturn in the near term. Perhaps we’ll be situated for a surprise in the second quarter of next year and going forward from there.”

The distinguished jurist asked for rare. This simply cannot be considered rare at all. This would have to be considered
medium.
By no properly considered assessment could this steak be rare. He is on the verge of calling in Mrs. Edith Wilbur.

“Never have I felt as irresolute as I feel now,” says the special chum. “I know what I want out of the business. I know what I want as a manager. But I feel irresolute, like I don’t know which way the weather is going to turn. Like I’m just killing time, without any sense at all. On the other hand, I do have an even more radical scheme that involves rolling a number of heads of departments.”

“How many heads, exactly?”

“One head in particular.”

“Whose name is —”

“I’m sure you don’t . . . Look, you are performing a meaningful labor here, friend, whereas I’m out there in the trenches producing booze and movies with numbers after the titles. I’m embalming corpses, transporting them across state lines. Our experiences are really so different —”

Then the distinguished jurist says, as though he is some sort of fortune-teller, as though he does not already have an opinion on the subject, “Jeffrey Maiser.”

“Impressive. You’re reading the papers.”

“The clerks brief me on what I need. And the wife reads the occasional magazine.”

“A troublemaker, a man who has defaulted on . . . a man who had the audacity to . . . I don’t even know how to describe it to you. He actually proposed giving over massive expenditures to . . . I don’t even want to talk about it. I have this fabulous movie in production, pal, a film that’s going to really require all our resources, a fabulous picture called
Tempest in Sahara.
Desert battles in WWII, the Bedouin, and so forth. This guy, knowing that this project is going to require a great deal of our promotional energy, or synergistic marketing, has the audacity to propose a miniseries on virtually the same subject and it’s —”

“A miniseries?”

“A miniseries. Do you have any idea what a stupid idea that is?”

“And,” the distinguished jurist says, “unless I am wrongly informed, has he not been frolicking with a certain —”

“Your facility with the contemporary moment is, uh, impressive.”

“When indisposed, I look at the periodicals.”

“I’m going to start over entirely in network programming. I mean to cancel everything that boob has in production, I mean to cancel every contract, and foreclose on his ridiculous miniseries, and I mean to make the network
the
venue for a twenty-first-century vision of programming. I can see the future, tantalizingly, before me, things like interactivity, synergies between television and the Internet, downloadable programming, video on demand, and especially enhanced-reality programming, cameras running twenty-four hours a day in the homes of Americans, where they’ll be able to watch cheats and thieves in the moment of their apprehension by the authorities, Americans catching terrorists, domestic and foreign, Americans rooting out sex offenders in their neighborhoods. Of course, I recognize that I have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, as I also have a duty to the medium in which we work. So it follows that I need a head of programming who sees these things the way I see them. I mean to make sure that the next head of programming can’t even
relieve
himself without my seeing him shake off, and in this way we will be leading rather than following. If that suggests a new model of programming that requires fewer employees and lower costs, so be it. I say
yes
to inexpensive programming that makes you, the viewer, the hero of the series, I say
yes
to the common man, and I say
yes
to the narrative of everyday life. I mean to drive up the stock price and I mean to make those analysts in New York take notice. So, buddy, there’s just the one thing I need to know. . . .”

The distinguished jurist, maintaining a veneer of thoughtfulness and impartiality throughout the impassioned monologue of his special chum, has had the chance to work his way through the steak. The steak wasn’t as bad as he expected.

“What is it that you need to know?”

“I need to know the future, buddy.”

“Which future is it that you need to know?”

“Well, ideally, I need to know if the markets will stabilize going forward. With this decision you’re about to make, can you assure me that the markets are going to be stable, tomorrow and the day after. That’s all. It’s just a tiny little question.”

“Are you asking —” says the distinguished jurist.

“No, no, no, I wouldn’t ask that —”

“Then what are you asking?”

“Look, I’m about to embark on the biggest downsizing campaign in the history of one of the nation’s largest media conglomerates. I’m about to meet with lawyers. I’m about to lay off an extremely well-known —”

The distinguished jurist rises up from his desk, holding, in his hand, the cloudy glass of
vin ordinaire.
He rises up, an imposing presence, a man whom others fear, a man who creates the truth, uncovers it, wherever he goes and who brooks no dissent, a
flagellum Dei,
and he begins, “Special friend. Now is the moment that we brook no irresolution. Now is the moment when we tolerate no weakness. Now is the moment when we withstand no hesitation. You come asking for certainty, and I say, special friend, that you should look into your own innermost heart, the sanctum sanctorum of your most fervid wishes. You should look into your heart, special friend, for any vestige of weakness that you find there, and you should take in hand this weakness and squeeze the very life out of it. As if weakness were a rodent that wandered into your bedroom. Weakness has no business in the future that begins today, friend. Weakness is a relic of a past. What remains for the weak are the courts of Europe. What remains for the weak are the commissions and the tribunals of a continent without belief and stamina. Human rights are for slaves. A man should die before he allows himself to be a slave, and if he is not dead yet, he ought to rise up to kill his master, today. Weakness and irresolution are for women and little children. And the people who can be crushed should be crushed, because that is the order of things, that is nature, and nature is what God made, and what God made is power. Yes, special friend, that’s what we put in the place of weakness. Power comes only from divine law, and what divine law says is that power is just. You may recall the King James Bible,” and here the distinguished jurist quotes from memory, “‘
Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good.
’ And so I remind you, tomorrow, not to hesitate. For what is the good, special chum, but the decision on which power settles itself? The states know this, the states know that they can draft the law in their borders and that all will be well within the borders of these states, and they will not be subject to reversal from a disenfranchised elite from a corrupt law school somewhere. This is not what power is. Power is the people in the moment of attempting to divine God’s justice, wrestling with God’s justice, knowing that the state is God’s scourge here on earth, and if the state says that a man should die for what he has done, then a man must die. If the state says a woman’s fetus must live, then the woman’s fetus must live, and so what is the lesson of obedience? The lesson is that God controls all things, and you have no recourse, and so you obey, that you may have everlasting life, special friend. The lesson of obedience is that there is no other path to travel, for every other path of life ends in madness or death. Every other way but the way of obedience is death,
E quali agevolezze o quali avanzi ne la fronte de li altri si mostraro per che dovessi lor passeggiare anzi?
What are seductions of the world that they are more alluring than what obedience can do for you, special friend? Power is the sign that a supernatural authority has visited a place. If power is given to you, then power is yours to exercise, and, more than an option or a choice, it is your
duty
to exercise this power. Life is the unremitting exercise of power, and if power is the ability to fire a dullard who is no longer performing his appointed job, then you must fire that dullard and you must have him escorted from the premises under armed guard, and you must seize his personal computer, and you must copy all of his files before he erases them. And if power is the ability to have a camera in the office of his successor, so that you can make sure that the successor does what you want him to do all the day long, then you must exercise this power and you must shrink from irresolution; you must delight in power, in the exercise thereof. Power is given to some men to prove that God’s reign is just, and those who seek to preserve the tradition of the law will not whimper in the face of responsibility. So if you come to me, special friend, asking what’s going to happen tomorrow, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I can tell you how to live, and that is to live the way we lived when we were young, special friend. How did we live? We proceeded as if the world were ours. We loved our parents and neighbors, but we couldn’t help them. Special friend, we have come to places like this temple of jurisprudence, and are we now going to be faint of heart? No, special friend, we are not. We are the linebackers on the front line of the divine, and we spike the quarterback of the opposition, and we do not worry about breaking his neck. Compassion is faintness of heart; compassion is a lie told by people who are afraid to rule. What will the meek inherit? Social Security benefits that will not last another twenty years.”