Rick Moody - The Diviners

The important thing is to empty your mind. The distractions are the encroachments of the commuters, the possibility of Jet Ski guys in their pastel-striped wet suits, the distractions of home. His mother, and his father, and his brother. Tune out his brother’s legal situation, his sister is coming up from New York. Oh yeah, and where is he going to go to college? “Adherence to truth is the cornerstone of dowsing,” Eduardo told him, and the truth is what he is after. He waits for the Y rod of antiquity to dip. He waits for it to struggle with him. He waits for it to confer on him the honor of a reply. He waits to be made more than he is, more than the kid who is grounded and who has to take the trash out and do all the laundry for everyone in the house, not failing to remove the delicates before putting the bundle in the dryer. He waits. The Y rod does not disappoint.

The Y rod says “yes.” The Y rod thrusts its prow toward the fecund earth. With uncanny self-sufficiency. He asks if the message lies ahead of him, and the Y rod continues to say “yes.” He follows the “yes” farther into the woods, “yes” past the little forest of silver birches, “yes” past a guy who is letting his springer spaniel run free, “yes” past the remains of a party from last weekend, a campfire circle and a couple of empty six-packs, “yes” farther into the forest, “yes” unto the moment the tip of the Y rod unaccountably rises up again.

“Is this the place where Eduardo left a message for me?”

The Y rod indicates “yes.” As if it’s trying to wrest control of itself away from him.

He flings the stick to the ground, and he gets down on his hands and his knees, in the drizzle, until his knees are covered with mud, pushing aside leaves and pushing against downed limbs and rocks, looking for he doesn’t know what. Until he finds it at last, when he’s covered with the topdressing of the forest floor, when his vintage windbreaker is dotted with decomposing leaves, when his jeans are soaked all the way through. Only then has he found the tree stump, on the ley line of the “civil disobedient,” where Eduardo has left the note for him. Folded into halves, these sheets of legal paper, shoved into a crevice in the stump. He sits beside the Y rod on the forest floor, so that now his ass is wet, too. In the dwindling light, he attempts to interpret the ink-smeared lines on the pages.

Dear Maximillian,

If you’re reading this it means that I’m probably in custody or have left town. If so, I apologize for leaving you all in the way that I have done. And that’s not the only thing I have to apologize for, but I’ll start there. And I’m sorry for bringing you all this way, out into the woods, just to tell you what you probably already know, that I’m gone.

I guess I should tell you that my name isn’t Eduardo Alcott, although maybe you’ve guessed this part already. Actually, my name is Sy Molina. Though I was raised in Rhode Island, my mother is from Guatemala, so I am Central American along the maternal line. I was educated at the University of Rhode Island in social work, and most of my life I have been a child welfare caseworker for social services in Massachusetts.

For a few years, I thought my job was honorable, if difficult. It was what I’d been trained to do. But after a while I started to feel like my place of employment was the one place not to be if you really cared about kids. Because I was seeing all these kids who were breaking my heart. I was seeing all these kids who were left out in the cold by the system, getting shunted around from house to house, mostly to places where the adults were being paid to shelter them, and these adults didn’t care at all.

I had hundreds of kids in my caseload, and I couldn’t remember the names or the details of most of their stories. I began feeling like I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t make a difference. In fact, when there was a problem, sometimes it seemed like it was just a hassle to correct it. I felt this burden, like I knew I was going to have to deal with all this paperwork and bring action against some of the foster parents, and the kids had already been beaten or their parents had left them or the parents were addicts, whatever it was. I just couldn’t live with the fact that I brought these kids more trouble instead of less. I had tried to help them out, and often I placed them in these homes where they were even worse off.

This was my job for twenty years. I’d read the case reports at night. I couldn’t tell which kid was Evan or Juanita or Lance. Had I gotten this kid out of South Boston or Dorchester or Worcester? I didn’t know, but I’d put him with some couple that already had four foster kids, and they had more spaces now because the last one had gone into the juvenile-detention system after assaulting his science teacher.

Everyone burns out eventually. One day, I chewed out my manager, told her that she was responsible for the trouble that all my kids were going to get into. We were making it worse for them, I told her, and I said this to her in front of a bunch of other caseworkers. I told my manager that the work we were doing was worthless, and after I left there that night, I didn’t get out of bed for almost six months. At the end of that period, I was living in the house and in the circumstances in which you came to know me.

I met this heavy metal kid in the mall by the interstate, and I was talking to him in the food court about what kinds of bands interested him, that kind of thing. I remember I was reading a book about the Black Panthers that I’d bought in a used-book store. Glenn seemed like he was impressed with anything having to do with the Black Panthers, and I have to admit his approval made me feel good. That was the very moment when Eduardo was born, out of thin air. It was a big relief for Sy Molina. Because Sy Molina had lived for his work, but he had also failed at his work, and his relationships hadn’t turned out too well, and he was making do in a dump of a rental in the commercial part of town, and he was reduced to talking to kids at the mall. No one else would talk to him.

Glenn wasn’t like other teens. Glenn felt like Eduardo was someone he could look up to. And this was the first time, in all the years that it had been my job to look after young people, that I felt like I was really interacting with kids, really having an impact. Back when I worked with child welfare, I would look in on a kid and I’d tell him, You aren’t using drugs, are you? Because you really shouldn’t use drugs. And then I’d go back to my house and smoke reefers, like I’d been doing since the seventies, and meanwhile the kid was probably sniffing glue and he wasn’t paying any attention to anything I was saying. Why should he? Glenn didn’t feel like I was an asshole, and when I was Eduardo, with Glenn, I had this sudden need to teach him things, to learn the kinds of things myself that I could pass on to Glenn, in the process proving to him what a special kid he was, how brilliant, how full of energy. It didn’t make any difference if he was using drugs. Eduardo’s attitude was that if Glenn was using drugs then maybe he was learning something about himself and something about his identity.

When Glenn brought Nina around, that was a big bonus, because it was like my caseload had expanded. I was starting to merit the kind of responsibility that I’d had when I was working for the state. Nina was sensitive. I could really learn some things, some crazy things, alternative philosophies, and I could tell Nina about these things, and she would really listen and her eyes would get wide. All the things that seem so impossible in the world, like genuine change, you could tell Nina about these things, and she would just eat them up. Maybe I did fall a little bit in love with Nina, I’m not sure. I know I never laid a glove on her, never even hugged her, but I know I wanted to impress her.