Rick Moody - The Diviners

“I am here,” he says, “to make a presentation. My assistant, Jeanine, has helped me in the matter of this presentation.”

What he does is stretch wide his arms, as though he’s doing some kind of special Sikh dance or something, and he says that the prologue to the miniseries must begin with the four fundamental elements, these elements being earth, air, fire, and water. Remember, he says, that when the Hun sweeps down from the plains, what the Hun brings is fire. Remember that the dawn of civilization is a moment of much fire. The hunters and gatherers, Ranjeet says, shiver in the dark on the plains until they remember that the fire can be fed. The fire can be fed with sticks and branches and it will continue to warm them. Turn toward the fire! This is how it is with the Hun, sweeping down from the plains, bringing conflagration to the decadent civilization of the Romans and the Saxons and the Gauls. So the miniseries itself, Ranjeet says, begins with fire, and the first image is of fire, and the camera sweeps through the forest at the moment when three separate fires are about to converge on a fourth, a moment of pure immolation, the kind that firefighters dread more than all else. And, yes, this fire could be anywhere, this fire could be in forests of the United States or it could be in Siberia; the audience doesn’t know at first, Ranjeet says. We know only that it is fire. And what feeds the fire? What feeds the fire is wind. And so in the midst of these fires, we feel the gusts blowing, we feel the flaming trees swaying in the gales, and then there is a shot from a helicopter, sweeping along the treetops as they burst into spectacular combustion, as if the conflagration is gobbling up trees by the hectare. And now we come to the edge of the wood, and the camera is actually dollying backward, down a hillside, a hillside already scorched, left with nothing but blackened stumps, as a cavalry of Huns flees out of the forest before the massing of the three fires, north, east, and west, before the windswept conflagration, Ranjeet says. They sweep down the hillside, and now the camera pivots as the cavalry of Huns goes past, and it gallops with them farther down, where, ahead, we can see a village of farmers and traders, and we can see now that the Huns are intent on descending into the village, and once the marauders have rushed past the camera, we see a last straggling pair of Huns, one with a crutch, and his companion, a Moor. Clots of dirt are flung up by the hooves of horses, Ranjeet says, fouling the surface of the lens, and into this hillside of ash and dirt plunges the man on crutches, falling to his knees and then onto his side. When he rises up slowly, he looks at the dirt in his hands. The fire is behind him and around him. The wind has changed direction, violently, and now the fire is flanking the little town of farmers and traders of the Silk Road, and the man knows, the man on crutches knows this, and he looks at his companion, the Moor. No words are exchanged between these devoted friends, but the sentiment is clear.

Only the pure of heart, only the humble of intent, the look seems to say, only the faithful, only the believers, can rise to a moment so fraught with peril. And then the man, Ranjeet says, lifts up his crutch, and what the camera sees, Ranjeet says, is the crutch against the flaming sky, here are the flames, and here are the black clouds and flames so hot that you would throw yourself on poison-tipped pikes to escape them, the flames on all sides, and I promise you this part could all be done with models and with found footage of American fires, but against all this is the crutch, and suddenly we find our hero, because that’s who he is, a hero, seizing the crutch in the forked V where he has placed his arm all these many years that he has been lame, and it’s like he has been healed in this moment of peril, healed by his need to do the thing that must be done, and he is holding the crutch aloft and he is saying these words, with all the anguish and grandiosity of a man who is saving an entire civilization from itself: “The innocents of this town shall not perish for want of rain!”

The Moor raises up his cloak over his head against another gust of the wind that is controlling the events of this storied day, and above him we see the great black clouds that have been gathering, the clouds that we have not been able to make out because of the smoke from the forests, but now we can see, because the camera is level with the clouds scudding over the scenery; yes, there are great black clouds that are heavy with rain, that are pregnant with the possibility of rain. And this is the moment, the moment of the pronouncement of our hero, when the rains begin. In a tempest. Again, Ranjeet observes, this could all be done with models and digital enhancements. There will be no need to actually film these storms.

“I tell you these things,” Ranjeet says, “because I want to say to you that I am the man who must direct the miniseries. At the very least I must direct the first episode, and also the episode which concerns the founding of Las Vegas. I am the man because I have the vision. I must direct.”

Behold, a portrait of the family, in the year 2000, as preserved on the digital video camera of aspiring filmmaker Annabel Duffy. The family assembled in the living room. Duffy residence, Newton, Massachusetts. First, the Reverend Russell Hunt Duffy, in casual clothes, a pair of easy-fit jeans ordered from the L.L. Bean catalogue, a turtleneck in brown, cardigan sweater with cables. He’s wearing slippers, too, but they’re not in the shot. The camera captures the Reverend Duffy’s discomfort. The vacant smile, as if pasted into his salt-and-pepper beard, is the indicator that the Reverend Duffy doesn’t know what to think. He squints. He gives nothing away. The Reverend Duffy, depicted as a man of strident routines. A man who has made sure that the used books in the bookshelf behind him are rigorously alphabetized, though many of the books are unread now for decades.

Beside him on the couch is his wife, Deborah Weller, PhD, who has her arm around the reverend, not vice versa. She’s the one who’s laughing about the whole thing, laughing about the slow pan, about the idea that Annabel should film the five of them while they are all there, because it’s what she can do, because it’s her gift. Annabel promises not to do anything with the film, not if they are unhappy with the results. It’s what she can give them, a portrait, when they are doing the one thing they can do, which, she says, is loving one another. Her mother is the one with the surfeit of love. Her mother on the couch, her mother laughing as if nothing in years has been as good as having the five of them here for this unscheduled time, even if it is a gathering that has an unfortunate premise, Tyrone. But that’s forgotten during the duration of this slow pan from right to left. Her mother is wearing navy blue corduroys and a paint-stained chamois-cloth shirt, cream colored, and her long brown-and-gray hair is shaggy around her shoulders, and her expression is both exhausted and joyous. If she had to lift a Volkswagen off any of them, she could do it. And yet is her mother anything else besides a force for selflessness and love? Where is that other woman, libertine, the hidden lover of sensuality, the drinker of too much wine, and why is she never in the shot? Why always laughing, selfless, and full of joy?

Next, her older brother. Her brother, the last few days, has remained in bed until the early afternoon. At midday he skulks down into the kitchen to look at the newspapers, with his glasses on, in whatever outgrown formal clothes remain here in the house, a pair of khaki pants that he had to wear for his confirmation however many years ago, and a button-down oxford that isn’t tucked in. He still looks like the smartest guy Annabel has ever met. If only there weren’t his difficulties, the weeks where he doesn’t sleep and calls her at all hours with ideas about the interconnectedness of banking, drug cartels, and descendants of the Mayflower families. Followed by the months of muteness and retreat. If only. Here on the couch, you can see him trying on three different ways not to stare, and then staring just the same. Staring into the camera as if this is to be the mug shot they might have taken of him at central booking.