Rick Moody - The Diviners

A cop cruiser slows to a stop in front of CBGB’s. Some of the kids scatter or head back into the club, where a hard-core band is doing the same old thing. Of those remaining, one boy says, “But he doesn’t know how to find the water!” As though he’s the audience plant.

“Exactly right!” Thaddeus cries. Smiles at Annabel, who holds fast to his arm now. “Exactly right. He has no idea because his father, Andrós, has decreed that no magic shall be practiced among Gypsies. Babu has heard stories of it. He’s heard the stories. And in his head, he’s trying hard to know what he needs to know. Forked stick. Some kind of prayer or incantation. Is there an enchanted phrase or something? He has no idea.

“One of the elders whispers to another, ‘We let him find the water, then we kill him.’ They nod sadly. Babu makes a big production out of finding the stick. He goes searching through the low forest. Among hornbeam, alder, sycamore, yew, Serbian spruce. In the distance, the sound of wolves because, you know, it’s Central Europe. There are lots of wolves. A howling over the Danube. It’s just part of the whole thing. He wanders in the scrub and finally he finds a forked stick, birch, and he’s walking back toward the fire circle. There are babies crying, and the women are worried. And while he’s on his way back, he trips on something or something trips him, and he falls on his face, you know, in a thicket of briars. It’s like he’s been struck by whatever overpowering force controls the dowsing in the world, and when he gets up he can feel the forked stick trembling like the limbs of a woman in childbirth! The stick is leading him somewhere! And he follows the stick, and he knows. In an instant, he knows. ‘Dig here! Dig here! Here there is water for your people! Here!’ And some of the Jewish grave diggers, accomplished in their craft, dig in that spot, and down they go, six feet, and find a spring bubbling enthusiastically. Nurit kisses Babu, and there’s a cheer from all the dispossessed families there, and they take him into their family, as long as he promises to convert, and they only cut off two of his fingers, one for stealing the necklaces and one for seducing a Jewish woman.”

Scattered applause, very scattered, and then the limousine again pulls near to the curb, and its door opens for Thaddeus and Annabel as if they were born to it. And the driver says to him, “Sir, a call for you.”

Shit. His wife, Sabrina. Like she’s some kind of diviner herself. Like she can sense trouble across the planes of time and space. Whenever he’s somewhere he shouldn’t be, the call comes. She doesn’t need to say anything. The call is an antique envelope, perfumed, with a wax seal. Annabel climbs into the car with him, but once in, she gets fidgety, staring out the window at the Bobst Library, suicide jumper’s site of choice. Nearby, boys head into the park with their acoustic guitars. A pair of cops on horses.

The wife is saying that the commercial is going really well. She’s saying that they want her here for a couple more days. Sabrina is saying the weather in Southern California is just perfection. It’s all completely inoffensive. The goal of a marriage is deep and abiding intimacy, that’s something people say, but Thaddeus feels like marriage is deeper when it has deception in it. When his wife says, “The weather in Southern California is perfection,” that could mean a hundred things. There are many more layers to deception than there are to truth. Truth is a log cabin with a dirt floor. Deception is a house with hidden stairwells, dropped ceilings, and furtive butlers. When she says the weather is perfection, she means, “I enjoy the weather best when you are not in it.” Sabrina means, “You make the weather appalling.” She means that her life, outside of marriage, blows where it lists, like a sirocco. She means that the weather includes the half-clothed or entirely unclothed body of some studio executive guy with a shaved chest. She’s probably waxing his shoulders right now. When she says all these things, she means, “I know you are doing these things, too, because you are a failed movie actor who makes movies for teens in Kansas City. I don’t expect much. But I expect you not to make me look like an asshole.” He met his wife in Southern California. Later, his wife had a miscarriage in Southern California. And since then they’ve been too busy for pregnancy. This layer is never to be spoken of and never forgotten. She’s in Southern California, where his business is, and he’s in a limousine with a twenty-eight-year-old office assistant, spinning out drunken lies about Gypsies. They get stuck in traffic at the junction of West Fourth and Sixth Avenue.

“It needs more,” she says.

“You do some.” He pockets his cell phone.

“I’m doing it in my head. Where it’s quieter,” she says. “You need the Gobi Desert. It’s big, and it’s deserted, and it has Chinese mythology. What about a martial-arts sequence?”

He has the flask open again. “You can’t just skip right to the desert. You have to work your way up. Next should be Morocco, where Babu and Nurit have Sephardic babies, who are darkly hued, and from there, in exile, they cross the Mediterranean —”

“You’ve got your geography screwed up.”

“You think anyone cares about geography? Anyway, the Mediterranean gives you the opportunity for a lot of stuff about the Greeks. Poseidon, all of that. And then you get to the desert, and the desert is the Sahara. And it’s during the Crusades, see. Their grandson is Jewish, born during the Crusades, in the Holy Land, and he’s driven into the desert, where he becomes part of an Ethiopian sect. And after that, there’s a kid, next generation or the one after that or the one after that, who gets abducted, in West Africa.”

“You don’t want it to get too much like —”

“You want narrative sweep. It’s a multigenerational saga. You have to have the desert; you have to have slave traders. Did I ever tell you about Peter O’Toole and my stepmother? We were going to see Lawrence of Arabia at some repertory theater, back when they still had them. And my stepmother goes out of her way to say that probably Peter O’Toole was one of them, you know. Probably he was one of them, and you could tell by his —”

“I didn’t know you had a stepmother.”

The limousine is going up the West Side Highway. The ventilation chimney for the Holland Tunnel is before them. Jersey City like a malignancy on the opposite side of the Hudson.

“Then you have the slaves of the American South. You have the descendants of Zoltan and Babu and Kwame of what is now Senegal, and these descendants are now in the American South, and some of them are on the Underground Railroad, in the middle of the Civil War, digging for water in the frozen Cumberland Mountains while the noble troops of the Confederacy march to their deaths. It was a lost cause! But the men fought on!”

It’s almost eleven when they pull up on Riverside Drive. They’ve eaten only salty snack items. Thaddeus Griffin is drunk. The driver comes around the side, opens the door. Annabel climbs out first, and she takes Griffin’s hand, helps him out of the car. He is the American celebrity, drunken, immoral, and with an enlarged notion of his importance. He has a beautiful office assistant with him who he drunkenly believes will do almost anything. The driver, standing at attention, shuts the door of the limousine. The doorman stands at attention as the contagion of celebrity is loosed upon the world again.

“You figure out the ending,” he says, in front of his apartment door.

“No. Tell me.”

His voice, on the landing: “The story stops briefly at the Irish famine and then it goes, uh, from Ireland to Iceland. And from there we’re in the — it’s the Russian Revolution. Always the diviners are on the side of the oppressed and the downtrodden. Poland during the Second World War. The Holocaust. The Armenian genocide. The founding of Las Vegas. Very important. The whole last episode concerns the founding of Las Vegas. The descendant of Zoltan is the beautiful daughter of a mobster who’s concealing the fact that he’s partly black. Well, I mean, technically, he’s, uh, he’s Mongol, Gypsy, Jew, Tamil, mestizo, Khmer, Maori, whatever. She slips off with a tenor sax player for a romantic weekend, gets knocked up, dies of an overdose. Her daughter is raised to be a Las Vegas dancer, spurned by her, uh, illustrious mob family. And the daughter of this dancer is given up for adoption during the Nixon administration.”