Rick Moody - The Diviners

So Max asked, on that chilly day in April, if there was a spring nearby where they could refill their canteens. And immediately the L rods opened in what Eduardo described as the “yes” position, the V position, and Max wondered, even as it was happening, if he was causing this to happen, the way impatient teens gathered around a Ouija board will always immediately summon the dead kid from up the block. Was Max tilting the rods down because he wanted to pass this examination so that Eduardo would quit looking at him that way? Still, the L rods had given the answer he was looking for. There was a spring. Eduardo laid a gloved hand on his shoulder.

“Now ask in which direction.”

He asked the L rods in which direction the water lay, which felt really stupid because it was like talking to his hiking boots or something. Immediately, the L rods crossed, and he found that the direction was not straight ahead, and not to his left, but exactly in the direction of magnetic north that Eduardo had indicated before. Max walked carefully forward, with Eduardo following behind, and the forest closed around them as if the divining rods were in collusion with the wisdom of the primeval forest. When the rods gave an ambiguous message about how to proceed, he waited, turned slightly, until he felt that tug, as if he had caught a fish on the end of them, and he hurried forward anew. Before long they heard voices, and then they saw other hikers in their brightly colored jackets, filling their water bottles from a pipe that protruded from igneous rock. They drank.

Eduardo congratulated him, and the two of them began to walk back, Indian file, the way they had come, toward the van. It was as they walked that Eduardo told him that the halos of the saints were not halos but auras, this was well-known, and that the divining rods could measure the auras of all persons, and that before they went back to Newton, Eduardo was bound, by his belief in the sanctity of the revolution, to ensure that Max’s intentions were honorable, through the measurement and calibration of his aura. So, Eduardo asked, would Max please stop where he was at the moment? Would he please stand completely still?

It crossed Max’s mind that he was about to be executed, that he was standing in the traditional posture of executions, like in WWII movies where victims turned their backs and laced their hands behind their heads. Hard to tell with Eduardo whether he trusted you or was about to put a bullet in you. Still, maybe the one thing Max did believe in was belief, and maybe it wasn’t the kind of belief that his father, the Reverend Duffy, believed in. He felt as though he wanted to believe in something, some great system, and that the opportunities for this kind of belief were few, because the only thing that you could believe in these days was an acne cream that contained enough fast-acting agents to clear up your blemish before the big dance. Or maybe you believed that if you went ahead and busted your ass on some standardized test and didn’t just fill in little circles in the shape of a bunny, you would get a chance to go to some school that would make sure you learned about business administration, so that, later on, working on behalf of a very large corporation, you could, with a straight face, say the words, “The public was never in danger at any time.”

Max believed that Eduardo believed in something, and he therefore hoped he would not be shot. So, in the stillness of the forest, when Eduardo said, “Tell me, does this man have the true heart of a revolutionary?” he thought that it would probably be okay, and that he would not fail the test. When he was invited to turn and face the Y rod and its assessment of his character, he was happy to find that the device was pointed down. It was in the “yes” position — because he did have the heart of the believer.

Was that at Monadnock? Or was that the first time they’d come here, to the pond? And was it with the Y rod, as he remembers, or did Eduardo do the test with his hands? As if he were in the process of bestowing some Andean blessing? Max wasn’t sure, because it was the spring, the time of gorging himself on the orthodoxy of the Retrievalists, a dizzy time with a flood of ideologies, and as he tramps through the woods now, around the pond, with the commuters whizzing past on their way home to cocktails, he thinks about how the price of enlightenment was that he needed to hide a lot of things from his parents.

Eduardo’s third lesson concerned ley lines, or lines of power, which “came from above,” Eduardo said, though he never elaborated on the nature of this above. Maybe it was a cosmic thing, you know, or maybe it was a religious thing. Whichever it was, you could dowse these lines of power with your dowsing rod. Just as you could dowse the water supply. And what you would find was that spiritual places, houses of worship or other alternative systems of knowledge and understanding, inevitably cropped up along these lines of power. Like you might find that there was a shaman living here, or you might find that an old church was on one of the lines of power, which made Max want to dowse the First Congregational Church to see if the church where his father practiced was a true place of spirit. At the same time, he sort of didn’t want to find out that his dad was a huckster.

The third lesson definitely took place here by the pond, because Eduardo had gone running like a madman into these woods, looking for the approximate site at which a certain environmentalist and revolutionary, always referred to as the “civil disobedient,” had once resided. Here beside the pond. Eduardo claimed that the “civil disobedient” had lived along a ley line and Eduardo claimed that it was possible to prove this. If you took a map of the countryside and you dangled a pendulum above this map, you might draw a line, Eduardo said, that ran right from the spot where the “civil disobedient” had once lived. The “civil disobedient,” H. D. Thoreau, Eduardo observed, knew that American civilization was about corruption. He knew that the laws of American civilization were corrupt; and he came to this place because this was where the energy originated. Eduardo, with the Y rod dipping in front of him, dashed madly into the undergrowth, to where the “civil disobedient” was granted his vision, a diviner’s vision, Eduardo said. The “civil disobedient” came here with nothing, with pittances of cash and meager possessions, and he came to make his union with the energy of this place. The union was good, because the “civil disobedient” never again wrote anything as flawless as what he wrote here. He never wrote anything flawless about the Maine woods and he seemed to have paddled the whole length of the Merrimack without crossing a single line of power.

The pond doesn’t seem so magnificent now, as Max bushwhacks through the skunk cabbage. Night is falling, and it’s starting to drizzle. And his mother is calling to him, “Honey! Where are you? Don’t go too far, okay?” But there’s always a good reason to go farther into the woods. They’re going to chop down the woods and put in a bunch of condominiums, lakefront properties, it’s already decided, with a boat landing for the Jet Ski guys. And something weird happens to Max just as he has this thought about the Jet Ski guys. He remembers something Eduardo said. Maybe it was the fourth lesson, and maybe the fourth lesson was mumbled one day when they were here by the pond, offhandedly, and the fourth lesson was that, Eduardo said, “If they ever come for me, look here, and I’ll leave a message.”

Max didn’t give it much credence back then. He never paid much attention to Eduardo’s more apocalyptic observations. Still, he’s doing what he never thought he’d do; he’s pulling down a live branch from a maple sapling, and he’s pulling off stray bits of bark, exposing, in the process, some of the green pulp underneath, and why? Because he thinks he’ll give it one more try. He’ll make a satisfying wishbone of a twig. He doesn’t want his mom to see what he’s up to, and he doesn’t know why. The pursuit of magic is like masturbation or sentimentality; it’s best done alone. When he has a hurriedly constructed Y rod, he does what he was taught. He puts the bifurcated section between the third and fourth fingers of his upturned hands, with the point facing upward, and he asks the Y rod the question he has for it today, and that question is: “Did Eduardo leave a message here for me?”