Rick Moody - The Diviners

“Well,” Randall says. “This is all so sudden. All so very sudden. But I must say, Thaddeus — if it’s okay that I call you Thaddeus — I’m touched and honored. I really am. Because there must have been any number of writers, experts in other fields, whom you must have considered — although I’m obviously more qualified than all of them. Still, I’m honored. Touched and honored. Obviously, I’ll need to think about it for a few days, and would it be possible to take a gander at some pages from your script? I think that might be the way to proceed, just so that I can see to what I might be signing my name? It’s really a very provocative proposal you bring, and I will give it my utmost consideration.”

Then Randall says, “Oh, and by the way, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

If his husband-to-be, Raoul, is going to secure the role of Rafael, it would be best if the movie star could meet him first. He certainly hopes that Raoul can hold his tongue and not say any of those incredibly impulsive things he says sometimes, because here it is, the movie star’s proposal, delivered in a passionate and intensive forty-five-minute tête-à-tête over a Château Lafite, and could anything be so wonderful and so sudden as this proposal? Nothing could. He just wants Raoul to share in the outrageous wonderfulness of it, and after the shoot they will perhaps wed, in a large ceremony in Sedona, because it wouldn’t be all that far from Las Vegas, and so perhaps they could get married in that spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright chapel up in the rocks, and perhaps the movie star would agree to be the best man for the both of them. Randall rinses the crystal out and then he points at the living room. Thaddeus tarries in the doorway. Beyond, the television screen murmurs hopelessly.

“Raoul, honey?” Randall says. Though he never employs cheap endearments. “Raoul, honey? Are you awake?”

The desperate venture to the city of Las Vegas on Interstate Fifteen. They don’t fly in. Airports are for frauds. Hip-hop impresario Mercurio? He’s in town, convening a high-stakes game of poker at the Venetian. Mercurio flies into town on the record company jet. Lacey? She is said to be in town, having returned from Europe. Europe, she says, is boring. Lacey has been drinking in the bars at the Bellagio. There are governors and congressmen here, there are judges and CEOs, there are sheiks and organized-crime figures. They all use the airport. But the desperate, those who pay for the bricks of the empire, they do not fly into Las Vegas. They come through the desert.

Therefore, Ranjeet and Jeanine want to see the city rising up from the depleted water table, they want to see the shimmering mirages of Las Vegas, or at least this is what Ranjeet says. Jeanine is no longer sure. She’s beginning to think that having staked her future on a foreign national who only a few weeks ago was driving for a car service in Brooklyn may have been a bit hasty, especially because Ranjeet persists in believing that he’s going to direct both the big three-hour first episode of The Diviners and the spectacular Las Vegas episode, a.k.a. episode thirteen.

Ranjeet has gone native. He doesn’t run his plans by Vanessa or Madison or anyone else. He doesn’t care about Means of Production or its legacy. He orders Jeanine around, implying that she doesn’t know about her own culture. He says that if the Liberace Museum is not, as she sees it, an absolute necessity for their trip, then she should not have accompanied him. He especially wants to see the capes. And so Jeanine has become the woman behind the megalomaniac. She can arrange many things according to instructions. She can book flights, like the flight into Salt Lake, where they went briefly to see the temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She can insist on a larger car, which is a dusty Mustang convertible, by which conveyance they are approaching Las Vegas. She can secure hotel rooms. And she can listen to the strophes, as he calls them, when they overcome him, his songs about the plenitude of jerky in truck stops off the interstate, about the poisonous American coffee of these wastelands. Is the foulness of the coffee in Elko a test for the immigrants who have come to this New World? And what about the women painted on the mud flaps of the rigs that they pass? Ranjeet sings of all these things.

He has somehow swindled the rental car through someone at UBC. She doesn’t even want to know. He is on his cell phone all the time now, and she overhears more of his conversations than she has conversations with him. Maybe he is dictating the strophes into some answering machine someplace. He seems to believe that the appearance of cell phone use is a necessary part of his job. “There is no actual city here, no actual place, no content of any kind, that was why this was the perfect locale for Benjamin Siegel, also known as Bugsy. Because if a place has nothing in it but mirages, then any kind of fantasy may be built upon this place, and the economy of such a city is composed of the ephemeral nature of fantasies and the massaging of fantasies into the possibility of gratification. It is a very fine word, gaming, because it implies that there is a complete elimination of serious endeavor.” They streak past another billboard: Topless girls! One hundred miles!

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she shouts, as he barks into the cell phone.

“I would like to hear what you have to say when I am done with this particular call.”

They are looking for the Spanish Trail. They’re looking for where the caravan of Mexican trader Antonio Armijo might have traveled in 1829. This would be a very good place to film any desert sequences. To film in the actual place of this caravan will bring a much-needed legitimacy to the project, especially as Antonio Armijo is himself a character in episode thirteen. They can hire the specialists they need, the gaffers and grips, the assistant directors, the second unit, in the Las Vegas area, which now boasts professional crews and a city department of film projects, just as with any thriving metropolitan center. There will be a reverse caravan of professionals to this desolate spot along the Spanish Trail, which could also be ideal for any featurette about the making of The Diviners.

They have passed through towns called Death and Devil’s Paintbrush, and they have seen expanses of craggy mountains and empty valleys, and it all looks the same; it all looks like a canvas on which the developers have not yet daubed their computer-aided pastels, and yet, at a certain moment on the interstate, which could as well be anywhere, Ranjeet cries, “We must stop!” He pulls the car off the highway, muttering about the geological survey of the Bureau of Land Management. It is right, he says, that he should be able to drive his rented vehicle wherever he should choose to drive it, through Russian thistle and mesquite. That is the great democratic principle. The convertible, which, rented at a luxury rate, is not designed for this kind of punishment, kicks up storms of dust as they streak into the midst of Ranjeet’s folly. They move out of the range of the cellular telephone, away from its roadside comforts, and Jeanine feels herself cradled in the emptiness of this place. Ranjeet presses on, thundering over the tracks of an all-terrain vehicle, until they can no longer see the interstate, and its hum sounds like a signal from interstellar space. Finally, Ranjeet says, “Here.” He’s out of the car before she has even registered that they are parked. Ranjeet scampers into the desert and falls to his knees.

“They came this way,” Ranjeet says. “They came here, believing that they were going to be a part of the historic rush for the nuggets of gold.” He picks up a hunk of rose quartz and studies it as if no other piece of rose quartz has ever been found. “I believe I am seeing flecks of gold here. Come quickly and look.”