Rick Moody - The Diviners

The mayor would not take no for an answer.

There was nothing to do but fabricate a response from the divining rods. Nothing to do but fake it. It was her great-grandfather who suggested this. Her grandfather didn’t want to do it. Because he was a moral man and he felt that it would do no good for their reputation. Tuttavia, ha detto troppo una bugia assurda.

Here is what the divining rod felt like in the hands of the men. Smooth but burdensome. You carried it as if it might break apart at any moment, as if it were a ceramic relic from the sixteenth century, and then you carried the divining stick into the field, and when the water was there under the ground, the stick trembled, as if it were in the midst of a Bernini ecstasy. The way her grandmother trembled, her grandmother who almost became a nun, or the way her mother trembled, who was among those who followed the men around in the field that very night with the wine. They watched the wedding, they jumped out of the car, they followed the men into a field, waiting for the men to find the water so that they could have the bonfire. Soon they would dance to the music of the concertina. That night, the Viscusis had to work fast, because that night they added a new skill to their repertoire: lying.

The mayor and his lackeys, armed, emerged from a copse, and now they watched as the Viscusis came to the most distant hectare of the mayor’s lands. They stood off to one side, and Marco Viscusi, her grandfather, held the divining rod, and it trembled in his hands, a steady, unearthly trembling, if a playacted one, and Claudio said, “Father in heaven,” or muttered another oath that would make it seem as though this were the work of the angels who sat right at the lip of the proscenium of all the hosts.

“Dig here, dig here,” Marco told them. But the mayor threw down the shovels and said, “No, you dig. We’ll be back in an hour.”

“Okay, I’m coming in now, Mom. Okay? I’m going to go ahead and remove the chain.”

She smelled them, Rosa Elisabetta, flush against the past, the cocktail onions, the breath of her husband, Meandro, the foul collars of his work shirts. And then her daughter pounding on the door outside, shouting to be let in. She could hear the voices yammering in the other room: bladder-control problems, the recount. She could hear the unfed cat whining. But she was a century back, when the Viscusis were sprinting across the fields, gunfire crackling over their heads, gathering up their things, making for the coast, leaving even their umbrella pines behind, that the mayor might burn them that night in his fireplace, cursing the name of Viscusi. Let this be a lesson to others! Off to America, in the company of the easy women from the fields, one of them already with child. That would be her own mother, the tyrant of Dyker Heights.

Statuesque, plus-size, smoggy sunlight in her dirty-blond hair, in front of the hospital, concealed in dark glasses, as if she might want to spray bullets into the crowd. She flags down the car, though it needs no flagging down. The woman in the gray raincoat and black designer suit climbs in. Slams the door. It rattles on its hinges. Arranges herself on the plush seat of the Lincoln Town Car. The car service driver, of subcontinental extraction, is perplexed in the rearview, would she slam her own doors? But she pays no attention, since she is already embarked on instructions: “Rockefeller Center. Here’s how we’re doing it: We’re making a U-turn here and we’re going back to Ninth, where we’re going west until we get to Smith. At Smith, first available left, then we’re going all the way over to Hicks, and then across Atlantic, not onto the BQE, along Hicks, using the back entrance to the bridge.” As if he mustn’t understand because he’s an immigrant. He has a child at home, you know, a boy, an American boy, a boy raised in America. He, too, has shouted the words Away from that socket! He has an education, which is better than an American education, which is shit. He does not eat every day at a restaurant with a plastic exterior. The woman knows nothing of these things. He nods, imperceptibly, and they are off, into the part of rush hour that is composed of employees who are late.

The large woman affixes herself immediately to the cellular telephone, or rather to its tiny pendulous headset. As if she’s talking to herself, as if she has just alighted in the car after a stay in the psychiatric wing of the Methodist Hospital. The boundary between telephone call and additional shouted instructions is difficult to pinpoint. “ Off of Smith Street! You think I’m paying you to park?” As if she wants to ensure that he should listen to the entirety of her conversation.

He learns many things. He learns about her place of business: “I’m not going to be in time for the meeting. Right. Drilling out in front of the house. They struck a water main. Six feet of water in the street. A union guy got hurt. There’s a liability angle, according to my lawyer. Electricity’s out, too. I don’t care what you tell them. We are in extended discussions with what’s-his-name, right, from the television show. He wants to be attached. Broad audience appeal. Just remind them. Use these words. Broad appeal. Can you remember? I’ll reschedule.”

The intersection at Atlantic Avenue has been under construction since the Persian Gulf War, which is when he arrived. At night it’s an archaeological dig. The city is in layers below the surface. They are burying a military bunker here, under the subway station, and under the bunker they are burying antiquities stolen from the nations of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley. The men are wearing hazmat coveralls, and sparks are raining from their welding equipment. It’s all a tangle when he tries to get across Atlantic Avenue, even down by the other hospital. This passenger is like one of the cats in the zoo. Big cats before feeding hour. Pacing the cages as if they are going to devour the very walls. His boy loves them. His boy is full of joy, and the displeasure of the cats is a revelation to him. His boy has very little memory, and so every day is full of novelty. A leaf of the newspaper skittering above a sidewalk is a revelation. All smells are beloved of his boy. The smell of refuse delights him.

“Dr. Weiss?” she’s saying. “Is it a bad time?”

Saturated with artifice.

“No, no, no. Of course. Well, something’s going to be done. To ensure stability in the markets. Something has to be done. That’s not what I called about. I had to phone the paramedics to come pick her up. They know her by name now, they’ve been over so many times. They actually call her Rosa. Rosa this, Rosa that. Snickering behind her back. I heard some crashing around. Like a demolition crew had moved into the basement. Which is basically true, because it looks demolished. She’d locked herself into the apartment, had the chain up. She shut herself in the bathroom. God knows how long. The cat was starving. I don’t know when she feeds the cat. The cat looks like it has anorexia. No, I couldn’t get in, and she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom, so what was I supposed to do? The television was turned up so that I could hear the news anchor in my own bathroom. I asked her repeatedly to let me in, I was firm but I didn’t engage, and I could tell she’d been at it, you know? A certain way she sounds. Too flexible. You know pretty much as soon as you hear her.”

When he is not driving, he loves to be driven. He loves to see the lights, the skyline, the traffic shimmering above the water. In his own country, you get to know people in traffic jams. You learn their children’s names, their grandchildren’s names. You talk politics. You are with these people for a long time. You have a fistfight, and then later you invite your combatant to dine with you, should you ever emerge from the traffic. Once, he started a poetry circle with young people he met in a traffic jam. Like many drivers of car service vehicles, he has an advanced degree. In European literature, from the University of Delhi. He is most interested in televised narratives. They had American programming, dubbed, on the satellite stations of the Punjab. The program he most admired concerned oil barons of Texas. This program was, of course, deeply indebted to the nineteenth-century novel, to the three-volume sagas. He believes Horatio Alger is shit, actually, though his work is to be studied as a foundation for the American television serial, which is a thing of beauty.