Rick Moody - The Diviners

“I think I might have sent it back, the, uh, I think the script you’re asking about might have been sent back.”

“Are you kidding me?”

A torrent of abuse ensues. Minivan, like, well, a minivan plowing up onto a sidewalk and taking out a few pedestrians, begins a tirade. It’s so predictable that it’s as if she’s reading it off a cue card. Your stupidity cannot mean the end of my business, et cetera. Like it’s a monologue. There’s a moment of suspense at the end, though, because sometimes someone gets fired over these kinds of things. So will Annabel get fired? And does the treatment in question even exist? Or is this another test of stamina for the black assistant?

Until Thaddeus, smirking, says, “Vanessa, give it a rest. Don’t be a jerk. It’s on my desk. I read it. It’s hilarious. It’s the one about dowsing. ”

Michael David Griffin, also known as Thaddeus, during his first Ashtanga series. At the Ashram of the False Guru. In this the seventh round of sun salutations, resistance in Michael David Griffin begins to fade blissfully away. He is perched in a corner of the ceiling, in some evolved yogi incarnation of himself, and he can see himself below. Thaddeus Griffin, in a silence of exertion, Thaddeus Griffin and the tidal movement of the breath.

He’s a beginner, understand, but the time has come for the Ashtanga series. The False Guru took aside Thaddeus Griffin on the way in to tell him of the excellent programs they have under way, like installing this indoor fountain and making available some synthetic yoga wear for the women who will want to sign up with Ford and Elite. Also there are harmoniums they have purchased for instructors. Wouldn’t Thaddeus like to be involved with the ashram in a more complete way? Wouldn’t Thaddeus like to be a part of the brochure of the False Guru, which elucidates the one true path to serenity and worldly abundance? His response was something bland and noncommittal regarding new program initiatives. He said, “Keep reminding me,” which he says when he is doing his best to forget everything just said. Thaddeus is unshaven, and his hair is standing on end, and he is in forearm stand, and his wife is in San Diego, most likely fucking that commercial director. Thaddeus works three months a year and then does a lot of interviews on prime-time newsmagazines. His movies give teenagers something to do.

The models around him, here at the ashram, move from their elaborate series of advanced bridge poses up onto their feet, then back over their heads into a handstand, as though they are made of pipe cleaners. He would like to fuck these models. He would like to fuck each and every one. He would like them, in bridge pose, to serve as coffee tables in his apartment. He is the minister of false consciousness. Why is it that he is always thinking about these things? Why is it that he experiences spiritual advancement only when next to the perfect ass? He is in bridge pose and he is arching toward the ceiling, and then he is down, and then he is up, and then he is down and then he is up. Just three more, the instructor says. Something in Thaddeus Griffin is shattering. Not literally, like when his friend Jorie popped her hip out of its socket during the Ashtanga series here at the Ashram of the False Guru. Sounded like a champagne cork ejecting. (She was taken out screaming.) No, it’s as if Griffin finds himself in the spin cycle of human souls. His mediocre career as a movie actor is colliding with the reality of the wife who is fucking a commercial director and this is colliding with the fact that he isn’t working and this is colliding with the fact that he isn’t producing films, either, which was his plan for escaping from the hustle of being a chump actor, which is colliding with the fact that even his young mistress will no longer put up with him. The twenty-eight-year-old mulatto genius won’t sleep with him, and now plank pose, and he can feel the extrusion of toxins from muscle tissue, dioxins, PCBs, the poisonous things in him, which are many. The instructor is quoting from the Sanskrit. The rich and the privileged come to perform the Ashtanga series so that they can learn justice, the instructor seems to be saying; this is where rich New York, which is primarily white New York, comes to learn compassion for that part which is brown, black, red, and yellow. This grotto, this ashram where the False Guru puts in his indoor fountain and names it serenity. Is the instructor saying this? Or is Thaddeus Griffin shearing apart? And is this shearing apart not a two- or three-times-a-week occurrence? Now the instructor is leading them in the chant of the guilty white liberal. The long low drones of the harmonium, with its bellows like the gritted exhalations of a chump movie actor. Michael David Griffin is beginning to sob again. It is good for actors to sob; it indicates serious craft. We would all do better / We would all do better / But we are on deadline / We are on deadline / We would all do better / We would all do better / We will do something for the poor and unfortunate when we get back / But we have compassion, we really do. The harmonium, and the Sanskrit, and another round of the full wheel, and the head of a model goes between her legs and her ankles drape over her shoulders.

His failures are so numerous, pouring from him during the Ashtanga series. Like when he seduced that development girl, Madison McDowell. He seduced her and then took her for a weekend to the track in Saratoga Springs, and he bet twenty thousand dollars on a filly and boy was that money gone fast. They had breakfast at the track, and he put Tabasco on the eggs, he ate the sprig of parsley, and he told Madison that her eyes were the bluest eyes he had ever seen, and then he bet twenty thousand dollars on a filly and lost. But her eyes were really closer to hazel. Then Madison took a call from that harpy Vanessa Meandro, and Madison cooked up an excuse to take the train back down the Hudson to the city. He’d rented the house on Union Avenue for a whole week. Then there was Jeanine Stampfel, Vanessa’s personal assistant. Few office assistants have been as miserable as Jeanine. Jeanine the self-immolator. Somewhere in the recesses of her apartment, which was actually her parents’ apartment when they were in town from Scottsdale, she was taking a common household lighter and she was applying it to her ivory skin. Here was Jeanine, in a pinafore, in her white bobby socks. Jeanine was on a fainting couch beside a leather globe that still listed Ceylon; she was taking an antique Zippo lighter out of a desk drawer and setting fire to herself. Her sharp intake of breath was like a chump-movie-actor attempt to do a standing split. Her forearm liquefied. He saw the scars.

“Excuse me,” a voice whispers next to him. A young woman in black leotard and leg warmers. Always the ones in leg warmers. “Excuse me.” He looks up to see where the spotter is. Across the room, by the bank of windows facing the theater across the street. The spotter is attending to someone’s hunched shoulders.

“Excuse me.”

Michael David Griffin says, “I’m trying to do my Ashtanga series, here. Can we talk later?”

She holds out a handkerchief. Folded perfectly, as if a secret message were contained within. Her ass is a temple. Greek city-states were founded on less. Michael David Griffin says nothing and wipes his eyes, and now his bodily fluids are on her handkerchief. She could have biological materials cloned from the weave of her handkerchief. Nervously, he hands back the handkerchief, smiles, tells her his name is Thaddeus.

“I know your name,” she says.

“Then I’m at a disadvantage.” In his inattentiveness he collapses onto his sticky mat. The smells coming off him are not covered in the Kyoto protocols.