Norman Rush - Mortals

This was about the Pollard case and its ramifications. Marion should leave this alone. He willed him to get back on the subject, so to speak.

“This is what I did for you. I talked to two of his girlfriends …”

Ray was amazed. No doubt Marion had contacted them by phone on the pretense of doing a full field investigation for some nonexistent government job for Morel, which was the way it was done and which was highly illegal. Marion was surrounding the news with silence so that Ray would appreciate the significance of it. He did. He was not in a position to do anything in return for Marion, which Marion knew. This was more than he deserved. Ray hit the confirm key.

“So what I got was that the man is a gentleman. They had nothing but good things to say. Both of them were academics and they both volunteered that their relationships had come to an end because they were relocating, essentially. Both had married other people. They seemed to miss him. They were both ex-patients and they both seemed to think he had fixed up whatever it was they went to him for in the first place. I couldn’t get off the phone with one of them. She wanted to talk about the man. So.”

Ray pressed the confirm key. A pause began that worried Ray. It went on. It was impossible not to wonder if something had gone wrong. He reviewed Marion’s delivery to date. Marion had been careful.

People had no idea how careful you had to be these days if you wanted not to be picked up. In a way he found it hard to believe himself, how amazing the seining operation being run from New Zealand, Echelon Dictionary, was, in what it could do, which was to process the entire spectrum of nonencrypted communications of every sort … phone, radio, fax, electronic … worldwide. He wasn’t supposed to know about Dictionary, but Marion had told him about it, mainly to make fun of it. Marion thought seining was stupid. It cost billions. What it did was capture and scan any and all digitized communications for key words, like Arafat or bomb or Mandela, store the ones of interest, use them to trace down the senders. But all you needed to do to defeat Dictionary was to camouflage your referents, use a little circumlocution, as Marion was doing adequately so far. Dictionary was run by the National Security Agency but the Central Intelligence Agency was a partaker, in a big way. There was a race angle to Dictionary that Marion hated. It wasn’t just all the noncommunist White Guys International, oh no. It was Anglo-Saxon — the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand. It occurred to him that Marion’s bad luck in the agency might have something to do with indiscretions in other quarters about Dictionary. Marion had felt strongly about it, he knew that. The pause was continuing. It was distressing. Of course Dictionary was monstrous. He thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christ compared to the air we breathe . Make it The State compared to the air we breathe, he thought. Marion was back.

“Let’s see. I ought to mention his radio program, half anti-God and half against aspartame. It gives you brain damage if you take it with MSG, if you’re a rat. It was alternative radio. Got nowhere. He stabs at things, now this now that. Trying to find a nerve, I guess. He organized some picket lines against circumcision at Harvard General. Nobody got arrested. He’s clean up and down. Not even a traffic violation.

“You can see the picture emerging. He’s out for trouble. He wants to be a Jew, doloris causa , and put his father out of business.

“So at the same time he’s evolving as a professional irritant he’s making a mint with his practice.

“I think the man is a devil. There are people around you could call devils. Divils, the Irish call them.” Rex is a devil, Ray thought.

“I think the point was to make himself a spectacle in Cambridge, under his father’s nose. That was the original thing, I believe.

“Then. Father dead, stroke, in 1989. Religious ceremony at the funeral, of course, subject will not attend. Who knows if it played a part that his ex was the grieving widow.

“Not only would he not attend, but he mourned his father outside on the sidewalk by giving out copies of a pamphlet, Was Christ a Nut? during the funeral service. I have one. Should you want it.

“But it gets even worse. The papers covered it. Somehow it had been arranged for the flyers to, well, fly down on the mourners inside the church, courtesy one of the subject’s followers, no doubt. I forgot to mention that senior died on vacation in the Caribbean, on a beach, and that a certain columnist wondered if the stroke was sun-induced or son-induced, s-o-n. The papers have it that the widow came out and spat in the subject’s face, and she did, but she missed.

“Man, he was being notorious! What fun! But it was getting to be more than that. The widow, by the way, is with … a major international financial institution. She’s an economist. She’s no longer in the Cambridge area.”

Ray realized that Marion had started to identify Morel’s ex-wife’s workplace as the World Bank, something Ray already knew, but had stopped out of prudence.

“Senior I should add was a majestic figure, patrician, fine head, fine voice, very tall, both legs the same length.

“So with senior gone, and senior’s wife relocating, he continues his practice. And I have to say that as a healer, people swear by him. They still do. He had to limit his clientele, because the way he proceeds is to talk to you in extenso about your probably defective view of life compared to his. You get a reading list and a pamphlet casting doubt on the existence of God along with your foot rub and recipe cards. He calls it eclectic medicine. You have to deal with his notion that God-belief is toxic, something it’s better not to swallow, credulism is his term, I believe. All he asks is that you contemplate his proposition, not that you accept it as a condition of treatment. He was especially good with musculoskeletal problems. Headaches too. I’m trying to see if I missed anything … Yes, he went to Taiwan for six months to get a certificate in Chinese herbs.”

Marion’s theory was that Morel, with his father and ex-wife off the scene, had suffered a certain deceleration. There were only two notable events in the period between senior’s death and the subject’s great encounter with a particular African gentleman and subsequent decision to leave Cambridge for Africa forever. One event had been a shortlived lawsuit against the Catholic Church for consumer fraud or false advertising. The subject had encouraged a young woman whose psychological reaction to an exorcism performed by a priest, an employee of the diocese, had been severe, to hold the church liable. It was very convoluted. The church sponsored various spots on television, which the subject had attempted to construe as advertising for a package of doctrines of which many were manifestly false, such as the assertion that demons existed. That had gone nowhere. The only other event was obscure. He had irritated a certain group not of interest to the extent that they broke the windows of the subject’s storefront. But this was a group not … of … interest . There was a pause.

Ray was puzzled. Marion was letting him think. Ray saw it. The emphasis on not of interest had been meant to signify the presence of an acronym, NOI, Nation of Islam. He hit the confirm key twice, hoping that Marion would understand he was signaling that he got the message.

Marion began recounting, with extreme circumspection, the coming together of Davis Morel and the chronic bad back of the Minister of Local Government and Lands of the Government of Botswana, Petrus Tshenelo. There had been an investment promotion exercise at Harvard starring Tshenelo, the scheduled main speaker and presenter at the event. Ray knew a lot about Tshenelo. He was a power in Domkrag. He was bright. His back had gone out on the eve of the seminar, immobilizing him. Regular medicine had failed to help him. Then it had been exit-orthodox-medicine-pursued-by-a-bear, and enter Doctor Morel, recommended by a porter who had been restored to paid servitude by him. Tshenelo had been magically restored. Marion added a stray detail about Morel’s fees. Apparently you paid only if you felt he had helped you. You could pay above a reasonable minimum if you chose to and could afford it and many of the overprivileged did.