Rick Moody - The Diviners

It’s important to choose a liquor store that is different from the last you visited. This is known as freedom of choice. When was the last time you went to the liquor store? Which liquor store were you going to? How is that liquor store laid out? Were you just a couple days away from being incarcerated in the detoxification ward? Then you must certainly go to a different liquor store because your patronage at various establishments ensures that there will be competition among package store businesses in your area, as it also ensures that you do not get personally close to any of the owners of these businesses. No choice but to go farther over, onto Sixth Avenue, where Rosa hopes she can find a store where she has not been lately. This she does, in a state of apprehension.

It’s rush hour, and the weather seems sharply colder than when she was incarcerated, and she might feel bad about her daughter, who will be at the hospital any minute now and who will be wondering why her mother is not in the hospital, and the hospital employees will be sheepishly searching the premises, but Rosa cannot worry about this now because she has a mission, and the first part of the mission is the liquor store, and when she reaches it — there are the usual warped linoleum floors and the reek of fresh industrial detergent — she is overwhelmed with hopefulness. The liquor store is owned and operated by Spanish speakers. She selects a pint of cheap rye whiskey and she asks the owner-operator if he will dust off the bottle, and this he does, when at last he understands, making use of a handy feather duster he keeps behind the register.

Rosa takes the bottle onto the street, where everyone is hurrying home, and she opens the bottle, nestled in its paper bag. When the blended whiskey hits the back of her throat, she can feel her throat close up, out of stunned delight, and she can feel the spiny points of anxiety begin to diminish, and she can feel the telephone conversations receding into some distant chamber of intelligence, from which only the occasional word or phrase will rise out of the murk, “marinade,” “pomegranate,” “mons pubis,” and this is exactly where she wants to be in the battle against hallucination and mental illness, because it enables her to pursue the next stage of her mission.

It’s months since she rode the subway, many months more since she rode the subway during rush hour, but perhaps the spectacle of her, a woman who has quarreled with the basic chemistries of human identity and who, in the process, has been given access to the entire global network of cellular telephone calls from which to pick and choose in her analysis of contemporary mores, is enough to induce people to move out of her way. She makes for the rearmost car of the train, and here she secures one of the seats that are meant to be left for invalids, and she sits in the invalid’s seat, and she drinks and passes an agreeable trip into Manhattan, to Forty-second Street, where she disembarks. Now Rosa Elisabetta walks through the long stinking tunnel that takes her to her destination, the bus terminal of fever dreams, where she hastens to the ticket booth, pink neon framing the disconsolate face of a woebegone bus company salesperson. She removes from her wallet some of the last of her rumpled cash, and she pushes it through the slot to the morose ticket agent and tells him that, yes, she’s going to Florida, where she’s going to put a stop to all this election madness.

The Krispy Kreme franchise in flames.

An impossible thing to fathom, that someone would come here to Concord, a sleepy suburb, home to lawyers and venture capitalists, drive past Emerson’s grave, and firebomb the local Krispy Kreme, the first in the state. Where did these fiends obtain the incendiary devices? Where did they get the will and the means to firebomb the Krispy Kreme? And was it true, as rumor indicated, that Concord was now home to a small mobile revolutionary cell? The Krispy Kreme was located on Main Street, of course, and now every citizen could walk by its remains. They would smell scorched yeast, burnt plastic, and electrical panels. The picture windows of the storefront had been shattered by the all-volunteer fire department in an attempt to contain the blaze, and this mission was successful. The only related damage was to the floor above the doughnut restaurant. Well, there was some smoke damage in the adjacent florist’s shop. No one was hurt.

The conflagration had erupted at eleven or just after, according to the newspaper accounts. A man “purchasing a six-pack” at the convenience store up the block saw figures rounding the corner. He wondered why these figures were running. A light sleeper whose apartment backed up to Main Street heard everything. She could verify the time. Occupants of a car passing at the appointed hour saw a pair of suspicious persons in tan overcoats in front of the Krispy Kreme.

No doubt, it was a terrorist group of some kind, as editorials opined. Some kind of domestic terrorist cadre had come here to Concord, or to the Boston area, and had brought with it the suspicion and fear attendant upon such things. There were terrorist groups in other places, in Israel and Palestine, in Chechnya, in Indonesia, but not in Concord. Until now. Even if this was some kind of radical environmentalist group with “humane” ideas about the destruction of property, it was still a terrorist group. The aim of terrorist groups was to produce anxiety about the future, and this was in fact what this terrorist group had produced “in spades,” according to an editorial on the subject. This is exactly what Max Duffy’s mother is saying on Friday afternoon, thinking out loud, as she slows in the bottleneck at the former site of the Krispy Kreme franchise, believing, according to her theories about the psychology of teenagers, that if Maximillian Duffy is to understand the error of his ways, he needs to see what revolutionary principles have wrought in one New England town.

“The bus driver lived up there,” she remarks, pointing at the blackened window casements above the Krispy Kreme restaurant. She’s made sure that her son has seen the articles in the local press. She’s made sure that he understands that the FBI promises to be involved in the investigation. The ancient Volvo belonging to the Reverend and Mrs. Duffy halts, like the cars ahead of it, and mother and son rubberneck past the black shell of the doughnut purveyor. Shattered glass, forlorn interior, police barriers, orange cones, scorched industrial equipment dragged out onto the sidewalk. At a Dumpster, scowling municipal workers heave up bits of wreckage.

Of course, they’d already taken Eduardo Alcott into custody. That’s the part that Max can’t figure out. Apparently they came for him after Tyrone called the police. And if the other Retrievalists were now remanded into the care of their parents or guardians, awaiting the possibility of charges in Eduardo’s case, then who actually performed the firebombing? Since the Krispy Kreme arson project had never been written down, as nothing was ever written down at Eduardo’s, there was no evidence of their plans. Who brought about this bold threat to unchecked multinational franchising? Was it really a terrorist group? Or was it a bunch of teenagers who had smoked too much pot and who just got into the pyrotechnics of the thing? Were they freedom fighters? Were they ordinary criminals? Were they rogue employees who couldn’t make ends meet at minimum wage and who were making a statement about pay scale? Was it somebody who wanted fresh original glazed doughnuts and was unhappy that none were for sale?

The town fathers had their theories. The town fathers had each been photographed in front of the rubble, decrying the national mood of permissiveness and complacency that led to such unthinkable tragedy. None of them knows any more than Max knows himself, probably quite a bit less, because they have never heard from the kids who hang out in the Krispy Kreme parking lot, smoking. The doughnut restaurant was practically new, was part of a rollout of Krispy Kreme franchises here in the Northeast, and now it is gone, and with it almost a dozen good jobs and a place for kids to go on weekends.