Rick Moody - The Diviners

“Left parietal lobe, almost always the proper region for the trepanning in these Bronze Age times, in Italy, Austria, Portugal, for example. There the skulls were beveled.”

The basement is damp and cold. The furnace is shuddering as if desperate, just a few feet from where Tyrone is sitting. One of Eduardo’s flunkies, a high school kid named Hal, has gone off for more food, returning with hummus and tabbouleh bought in large tubs from the local health food market. Eduardo is very passionate about the health food market. Eduardo is passionate about many things, unless perhaps this is just part of the indoctrination process.

It happened this way: Tyrone and the Great White Hope had jogged up the street, under cover of night, fleeing the residence of Tyrone’s adoptive parents. It seems so long ago. They fled, and there was a brief moment, in the air of autumn, when Tyrone’s liberty seemed grand, like he was a dove released. Then there was some waiting, and shivering, underneath an oak, in the shadows, until an unassuming Econoline van appeared, a van featuring the sort of unsettled idle that is an augury of future muffler trouble, and before he could think twice about it, Tyrone was jumped, blanketed with some rough wool, bundled into the back of the Econoline, which unfortunately did not have the all-purpose Sears love mattress, and then Tyrone, who did not struggle, was blindfolded. Tyrone was told not to ask questions. Tyrone was told that if he cooperated there would be no need for force.

The Great White Hope had appeared to be just returning from some after-school activity, basketball practice or whatever it was he did, oboe lessons. The Great White Hope appeared, notwithstanding excessive bodily ornament, to have his middle-class white-boy routine down pretty good. But appearances deceive. Because the Great White Hope was attempting to shake off the chains of his elite birth; he was attempting to be with the people, alongside his pals, these revolutionary types, who favored the rhetoric of high-powered cranial saws. You held the saw in place with your forehead while you winched the boring mechanism into the head of the sufferer, who was bleeding like a stuck pig.

At first, Tyrone believed that the Great White Hope had given him up to the authorities. But of course he couldn’t figure out why he needed to be blindfolded in order to be extradited back to the Empire State. Tyrone’s revolutionary spirit was clouded at this time. He had a feeling of loneliness, and he believed that the Great White Hope needed to turn him over, perhaps to claim some reward, or to get his photo in mass-marketed periodicals, or simply to indicate his supremacy over his darker adopted brother. Tyrone’s feeling was sorrow, but sorrow is for the weak. In years past, Tyrone had attempted to instruct the Great White Hope. In fact, this was an area of some nostalgia. Tyrone wanted to be certain that the Great White Hope got beyond the standard-issue education of the rich suburban kid. Maybe Tyrone’s kidnapping, in a van that smelled of spoiled milk, was proof enough that the Great White Hope had now come into his own. There was the silence of the van, and then there was incense burning, sandalwood, to cover up the dope smoking and the spoiled milk. Tyrone began to relax, to feel that a condition of permanent flight was paradoxically useful to his legal situation. If he had no idea where he was going, it could hardly be bad for him.

Three or four persons hustled him into a little shack apparently somewhere in the northeastern suburbs. They led him stumbling into a cheap living room, which was done up in the cut-rate paneling that indicated the permanent vegetative state of National Football League enthusiasts. This he knew when the Great White Hope removed the blindfold.

“Sorry, bro. Hope it wasn’t too uncomfortable.”

Tyrone said nothing. Nothing had served him well before. The revolutionaries stared at Tyrone, blinking, as if he astonished them. He noticed that the table was cluttered with ceramic ashtrays of the sort made by fumbling elementary school students. Whoever acted as leader, and it became obvious quickly that the leader was this Mexican man with wild hair and fervent, unblinking eyes, had a school bus full of sixth graders on his payroll. Further evidence of this was to be found in the knit pot holders in the kitchen, where the revolutionaries all ate together. One of the four teenagers standing by offered Tyrone a beverage: Gatorade, the popular sports drink, complete with electrolytes. No telephone anywhere to be found, and a television with only a coat hanger for an antenna. For a time, they all said nothing. Later, the comrades played cards in silence.

After some hours, it came out that the Great White Hope needed to return to the home of his parents. They needed to come up with a story for him to provide these genetic parents. Eduardo silenced the deliberations, motioned to Tyrone to stand up, and took him down into the basement, where, in his stiff, academic English, he began the first of his study sessions on the theory and practice of the organization known as the Retrievalists. Tyrone said the syllables over and over, as if the repetition would give some clear evidence of hidden meaning. The Retrievalists. The first lesson concerned the bogus history of the Alcotts, described above, and when it was over, a wordless teenage girl stretched out a down sleeping bag for Tyrone on the basement floor. The Retrievalists would have him sleep there.

What was it they wanted? Eduardo asked rhetorically on the second day. Naturally, they had many answers to this question. What they wanted was the rescue of this continent from its oppressors. They wanted relief from the oppressors who had wrongly seized the American lands and visited upon the natives a genocide, who had all but wiped out the mighty bison, who had sown among the native peoples such foul illnesses as smallpox and alcoholism. When they had completed this mission, they would move on to other continents, in the following order: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America.

What were their origins? Their origins — and here Eduardo hoped that Tyrone, as newly installed Minister of Information, would soon come up with a better recitation of the facts — were in the environmental movement. They had originally been an autonomous cell in a decentralized organization with no leader, which had no revolutionary position and whose goal was felonious attacks on property. It should be noted that the Retrievalists still supported the cellular structure of this environmental organization, they just needed to enlarge the political debate to include other legitimate modes of instruction and resistance, such as prisoner exchange, propaganda, black-market financing, counterfeiting, cyberterrorism, et cetera.

“We are aware of certain problems of a legal nature in your own situation,” Eduardo remarked on Saturday, in the middle of the indoctrination, “and we want you to know that we applaud your dramatic efforts in the city of New York.”

“If you’re asking about the, uh, the Asian woman,” Tyrone said, “I had nothing to do with that. She’s my friend.”

“We understand that it is important to keep the story streamlined and in a condition where it can be repeated without mistake. We applaud the rigor of your preparations.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it, sir. I got enough problems.”

“For the time being, you are in the care of our organization, and we would like to present you with some intelligence on the strength and militancy of our efforts, so that you may indeed become our Minister of Information.”

It was like graduate school all over again, that was the truth of it. In graduate school there was always the solemnity and the forced language. Eduardo had a trait in common with the graduate students of Tyrone’s acquaintance, and that trait was facial masking. Schizophrenics used the technique, too, especially when speaking to the manifest and latent content of symbolic systems. Tyrone knew this because he’d had the occasional hallucination himself.