Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

After she completed this elucidation of the self-help program that had brought us together here, she asked if anyone else had a “burning desire” to speak. The one-armed man and I looked guiltily at each other. Perhaps both of us would have had plenty to say, but now it seemed that a response would only prolong the misery. We sat in an uncomfortable silence for a good three or four minutes. The schoolteacher riffled through sheets of program-approved literature, as if this were going to ensure our continued submission, and then she said, “Why don’t we all say the serenity prayer?”

Since the meeting ended thirty-eight minutes early, I had a good long time to sit on an old mossy bench in front of the Unitarian Universalist church. The one-armed man kept me company for a while, and what he told me, when he had a chance to speak without fear of retribution, was that he was thinking of leaving the island. The same people, the same roads, the same two ways of getting to town, the same enmities, the same movement to the seasons, the same waves breaking over the same rocks, the same unforgiving winter. He didn’t see what there was in it for him. He didn’t mind pruning rosebushes, and the little cottage that the Hilliards had built for him was charming enough, and that architect who designed it sure was a friendly guy, but—

7. Modernism and Its Links to Contemporary Terror

The architect! He was the link! That was it! I could scarcely wait for the one-armed man, with his shirtsleeve flapping like a semaphore, to go on his disconsolate way up the block. Why hadn’t I thought about it before? While waiting for my wife to return, I was on pins and needles! The missing causal agent, the conspirator sine qua non, the person who almost certainly passed secrets, and who knew what else, to the dark-complected hostiles, was now revealed to me. I experience these revelations, you see, as nearly catastrophic in their gravity. My ability to reason as methodically as I do must be considered a blessing from above, perhaps from the higher power . Though the schoolteacher at the meeting might argue that a higher power had no place in her newfound life as a motivational speaker, I could but conclude that there was indeed intelligent design, benevolent intelligent design, especially in the matter of conspiracy detection.

Fact: Who was the leading architect on the island? I couldn’t remember his name, and the more I thought about it, the more this blockage seemed evidence of the fact that I was being drugged by a person or persons who were anxious to keep me from learning the truth about the Omega Force. And yet even without his legal name, it was clear that the leading architect on the island, by virtue of the number of structures lately built, plans submitted to the zoning board, was the modernist architect I have already discussed. His buildings, it goes without saying, were monstrosities that looked more like the gun emplacements and bunkers of the dilapidated military structure on our island than they looked like proper houses. There were always show-offy adornments like round windows, carved wooden eggs hanging from the eaves, newel posts shaped like lighthouses.

Fact: Who, by virtue of his drafting and planning, had best access to the necessary topographical maps and surveys of the island? Certainly, here again, the conclusion is obvious. The modernist architect was the belle of the ball, invited to every party, every luncheon, where he was inevitably cooed over by the women of the island. This despite the fact that there were serious character flaws to the modernist architect. For example, no muscle tone. The modernist architect did not take regular exercise in any of the popular ways. I had never seen him playing tennis. I had never seen him playing golf. I had never seen him during the adult swim hour at the country club pool. I had never even seen him taking a walk. The modernist architect had no wife. And this was perhaps the most damning thing that could be said about him. A wife is the very foundation of a successful moral life. Of course, I have no objection to alternate lifestyles, and I knew a number of highly effective persons during my days in the Nixon and Ford presidential administrations who may or may not have dabbled in alternate lifestyles. They were fine men who went on to excel in the public sector. But there was no place for alternate lifestyles on the island, which exists primarily as a site for the socialization of the young.

Fact: The refusal to join one of the country clubs is a judgment of the traditions of the island.

Fact: There is the matter of his own house, which is in the Japanese style, low and squat, with only tiny windows facing the road and large hedges covered over in bittersweet. I was long repelled in my attempts to lay eyes on the structure, until late in one off-season I sneaked onto the property to assess its ugliness and vulgarity. I’m sure he used chopsticks when dining and served paltry vegetarian fare like bean curd and chickpeas.

Fact: All of his designs, or many of them at any rate, featured the architectural form known as the loggia. What are these loggias but ways to insist that persons go outside, and once they are outside, are they not susceptible to any airborne virus that should happen by? Such as bovine herpes mammillitis? Or vesicular stomatitis? Or Newcastle disease? Weren’t the loggias attempts to create a vulnerability in island dwellers such that they were helpless in the event of foreign attack?

Fact: The modernist architect (I remember now, he does have a name, Gerald F. Laughlin IV) occasionally wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo CCCP. Frankly, I find T-shirt wearing dubious among middle-aged persons, but that is neither here nor there. For those of you who have followed me so far, it is without doubt the case that the T-shirt in question signifies allegiance to the former USSR, or Soviet Union, as these are the letters, in the Cyrillic alphabet, for that despotic regime. On several occasions, he was seen wearing this T-shirt on the ferryboat, in full view of impressionable young people. The Soviet Union? They killed millions! Millions of people were starved by the thugs of the Soviet Union, and the modernist architect had the audacity to wear a T-shirt with this acronym emblazoned upon it? The CCCP was experimenting with biological agents to be used against our nation as early as the 1950s. Naturally, it was necessary for us to experiment to keep up, especially in the area of biological agents intended for use against livestock in their country.

I concede that this evidence about the architect was circumstantial and would remain so, unless I was able to procure a photograph or perhaps a video recording of him delivering nautical maps and site plans and so forth to dark-complected persons. I had as yet no such material evidence. Furthermore, it would be difficult for me to obtain such things in my present condition, viz., reliant upon either a pair of canes or the dreaded walker, at least until I should recover a little from my seizure disorder.

In the absence of direct evidence, I will confine myself today to a brief overview of modernism in general and its links to, well, if not terror, suspicious political behavior. According to my analysis, the kinds of personalities who would practice modernism, as I’m defining it, would certainly do such dreadful things as tip off dark-complected persons to the presence of a biological-weapons laboratory within six miles of the island on which I was dozing (on an outdoor bench) and waiting for my wife. There was that poet, for example, the fascist one; and there was that other poet, the father of so-called modernist poetry, a vicious anti-Semite; there was, as well, the Irish novelist, alcoholic with a schizophrenic daughter; Thomas Mann, definitely a homosexual if not a Communist, and he abandoned his own country during the war; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, certainly opposed to the czar, and thus a Communist. French artists and writers, that’s like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. You have Sartre, certainly a Communist, his wife, certainly a Communist. Anyone who is French is Communist. If they aided the Vichy government, they were Communists, and if they opposed the Vichy government and aided the Resistance, they were Communists too. Anyone from Africa is a Communist, because all postcolonial writing is proto-Communist or pro-Communist or crypto-Communist; any Muslim artistic endeavor, such as the writing of African Americans, if it’s in support of the Nation of Islam, might as well be Communist. Anyone who is tenured at any of the Ivy League universities is a Communist, and so forth. I could go on.