Rick Moody - The Diviners

After each session would come the catechism. What is our name? Our name is the Retrievalists. What is our origin? Our origin is in the struggle against the pestilence of humanity. When did we begin our struggle? We began our struggle in 1994. What is the nature of our actions? The nature of our actions is random and discontinuous, but we seek the violent destruction of the property of the oppressor. Who is the oppressor? The oppressor is the large multinational corporation and its allies. When will our mission be completed? Our mission will never be completed. How long do we serve? We serve until death.

On Monday, after some more ranting while the kids are at school, there is a period of a couple of hours when Eduardo Alcott has other responsibilities. What could these responsibilities be? Some kind of computer-programming job that he uses to finance both his living situation and his revolutionary cadre, where he might also have access to a server that conceals the Web presence of the Retrievalists. When Eduardo goes out into the poisonous atmosphere of the world, he leaves behind sentries. For Tyrone’s security. Hal, the guy with the unwashed hair, and Nina, the sullen blonde who always seems to wear her sleeves at such a length that as far as Tyrone knows she has no hands. A big lug with a heavy-metal mullet and a Korn tour jersey, named Glenn. Maybe the conversation that ensues is completely scripted. Impossible to know.

“Our parents are perfectly nice and everything, and we were never mistreated by them,” Hal says.

“Yeah,” Nina says. “Our parents are perfectly nice.”

“We came to believe some things, know what I’m saying? We feel like you walk outside, you see certain things, you know, bad things. How can you not walk around and feel like things are getting worse, you know? Once there was some mystery to this life, now there’s none. Now there’s just waking up and taking the standardized test, making sure that you get into a good college, you know? So you can go work for the Bechtel Corporation or the Carlyle Group. And, like, all this pressure about college, what’s that about?”

“Yeah,” Nina says. “College.”

“I know how to clean my room and I know how to pick the lock on the liquor cabinet. That’s about it.”

Glenn, across the room, adds his own perceptions of the revolutionary situation while sharpening knives. “I had to take the door actually off the hinges at my mom’s. She had it all in this closet with a really strong padlock. I just took the door off the hinges.”

“We’re normal kids. We’re not statistics. But we’ve got to this point where we feel like we have to act, get it? And that’s why we’re going to do what we have to do. Because that’s how a revolutionary movement functions, you know, it acts.”

Tyrone takes in the nuances of the scene. The television, with the sound off, is unwatched, as ever, though it happens to be broadcasting, at present, The Werewolves of Fairfield County. A repeated episode he happens to have seen. Time, in this rerun episode, is moving backward rather than forward. Only the werewolves seem to know how to deal with it.

“We’ve been thinking about it, you know, and we have, like, deliberations. We debate,” Nina says. “What should be the first direct action? Like, what will be the thing that gets us the right kind of attention so that we can continue to attract other soldiers, or whatever, and to promote what we believe in?”

Gradually, as though a curtain is being retracted by an offstage dwarf, the plan under discussion emerges. The plan, like many such plans, involves the element of fire, which in Tyrone’s fevered and heavily sequestered imagination is the most ominous of elements. The plan has been dreamed up by a committee of teenagers, and the plan involves a firebomb, homemade, which shall be used on a local chain business, which does not belong in such an estimable place, a place of nature and wildness, namely Concord, Massachusetts.

“Like, what makes those people think they can just bring a franchise like that into a town like this?” Hal asks. “What makes them think they can do that? Don’t the people who live here have any say in these kinds of things? They don’t have any say because these things are all being figured out someplace else by real-estate assholes and —”

“By some idiot,” Glenn says, grinding another knife.

“By some guy who probably has kids that he needs to put through school somehow, and how is he going to put his kid through school, and he can’t figure out any way he’s going to do it because he shouldn’t have gotten his wife pregnant in the first place, they should have used some kind of birth control, or they couldn’t get an abortion because of where they live, or whatever, so he has no choice but to get a job at this lousy place, and then it’s up the chain or get fired by the big corporation, and so now he works his way up, like, until he’s got the job that is oppressing other people every day, and that’s the job of figuring out where the franchises go.”

“I don’t even like doughnuts,” Nina says. “I mean, I maybe liked doughnuts when I was a kid, but now I think doughnuts are eaten by people who don’t know any better. Like, the whole idea of the doughnut is to dumb you down. People, they eat the doughnuts and they can’t think straight, and they have to take a nap, you know, and then they can’t understand the forces that are working against them, like, they don’t even know whether a doughnut is nutritious or anything, because how are you going to find out? The doughnut is a symbol of how people don’t have any power, and so the doughnut has to go.”

“We tried thinking up some revolutionary slogans for a protest,” Hal says. “You know, like, WE CALL IT DOUGH NOT! ”

The three kids laugh, and their laughter is open and inviting, as if it comes from a more innocent place. Tyrone hears fervor, and hears youth, and hears how lovely and frail youth is, how open to the bad ideas in any room, so easily sent on long, erroneous rambles, and these things can coexist, the frailty and openness of youth, the mercilessness of it, and that’s how you get a pair of Cambodian twelve-year-olds who smoke opium to persuade an army of adults that God speaks through them.

“So you’re going to firebomb a Krispy Kreme?” he asks.

“Reduce it to cinders,” Hal says.

“Leaving a black, smoky pile of nothing,” Nina says.

“And when is this meant to happen?” Tyrone asks.

“Can’t tell you that,” Nina says, and she goes and puts her hands on the shoulders of Hal. “Eduardo knows all of the specifics, and we only learn things bit by bit, and that’s because we’re not, you know, so old yet. But we’re in on all the planning and deliberations and stuff.”

“You’re expecting that I’m going to hang around and watch you guys blow up a doughnut restaurant?”

Glenn lines up knives on the counter. “Eduardo says you are a revolutionary.”

“I’m a bike messenger,” Tyrone says, and then says more than he’s said in a long time. “Man, I’ll tell you what I am, I’m a bike messenger. But once I, too, had a lot of ideas about things.” Warming to the subject as he goes, “I had all these ideas that I could change the world, the kinds of ideas that you guys have. I thought I could run for office. I thought I could help the other people who have my color of skin, because I was lucky enough to get a good education, which most of the people with my color of skin don’t have. For no good reason did I get any of this. The dice just fell my way. And I could go back and teach these people how to do better in the world, make more of the world. And the way I thought I was going to do this was first with words, and I went and worked with the words, you know, in graduate school, and when the words wouldn’t bend the way I thought they were going to bend, when I woke up one morning and the sentences all looked like they were going places I never expected them to go, then I gave up trying to do that.”