The Four Last Things

Chapter 19

I had about four hours to kill before I was due to turn up at Bernie's, bottle in hand, so I killed them by driving Eleanor back downtown. She was silent for the first twenty minutes or so, and when she spoke, all she said was, "That woman should be in jail."

"When she goes," I said, "she's going to have a lot of company."

Before dropping Eleanor at the Times, I parked around the corner from the Borzoi while she ran into the lobby to buy some of the books and tapes I'd seen on sale there. If anyplace in the Borzoi was safe, it was the lobby.

Nevertheless it seemed like a hell of a lot longer than ten minutes before she opened Alice's door and slid onto the front seat, clutching one of those flimsy plastic shopping bags that the cheap supermarkets now give you, the ones that manage somehow both to break easily and to remain in the environment forever. It had a picture of Angel and Mary Claire on it. It was a new picture: Angel was holding her kitten.

"The collected works of Angel Ellspeth," Eleanor said, "and one tape by the little girl called Anna. Eighty-one dollars and forty cents, if you can believe it. Who's paying for this?"

"That's a good question. For the moment, I guess you are."

"I'd better get a story out of this. I can't put all this wisdom on my expense account if I don't write something."

"Poor you," I said. "I haven't even got a client."

"Sure, you do. Truth, justice, and the American way." Eleanor spoke in series commas.

When she opened the door to get out at the Times she kissed her index finger and touched it lightly to the tip of my nose. "I'll call Chantra," she said. "It's only for a week, right?"

"At the most."

She gave me a long look. "So now who's the optimist?" she said, sliding out. She crossed the crowded sidewalk and hurried into the building without glancing back, and I headed Alice around the block and back toward the Borzoi.

I found what I needed only about a block away from it: the Russell Arms. The Russell Arms had never been as fancy as the Borzoi, and it might never be home to a hot new religion, but the rooms were not dirty enough to be terrifying, the place was almost empty, and the desk clerk was willing to take cash. I booked myself in for the night, ignored the unspoken question about my luggage, grabbed the change of clothes I kept in Alice's trunk, and went up to the room.

The stream of water from the shower was lukewarm and irresolute, and it took all the soap the Russell Arms was willing to provide before I stopped looking like a particularly slovenly anthracite miner. I pulled back the shower curtain and looked out twice before I finished. Nobody there but a cockroach. There was no singing in the shower.

Leaving the ring around the tub for the maid to swear at, I took the stairs down to the street and checked out the service entrances to the Borzoi again before popping Angel into Alice's cassette player and hitting the thickening traffic for Westwood.

As I drove west on Wilshire, Angel creepy-crawled her way over various hidden landscapes, offering the listener the use of a spiritual flashlight. No question about it: you had to be there. In a room full of believers she had seemed almost frighteningly potent. On tape she just sounded like an extraordinarily bright, highly articulate, and spiritually bent little girl.

But not quite. There was an odd, halting inflection in her voice, a kind of verbal limp, that I couldn't identify. It wasn't the hesitancy of someone trying to remember a long speech. Angel's trance had seemed real enough, and at the Revealing I'd attended with Skippy she'd stemmed the tide twice to respond to the audience. Her spiel wasn't memorized. The words were flowing through her in real time, and she could be spontaneous. Wilburforce had said that the first little girl was a channel. I didn't think I believed in channels.

Out of curiosity, I ejected Angel in mid-phrase and fished around in the plastic bag for the tape of poor little Anna. Jesus, even I was calling her poor little Anna. I slipped it in and turned up the volume.

Her voice was lower, more resonant, with a husky, dark edge of urgency to it and a natural, sinuous strength. Like Angel, Anna had been taped at a Revealing, in front of a large audience, and her listeners responded to her much more vocally than Angel's had. Compared to Angel she was a real spellbinder, a girl with revival-tent potential.

A phrase floated into my mind: the Burned-Over District. Something to do with revival. I put it on hold and refocused on Anna.

The front of the cassette box pictured an ordinary-looking little girl with long, straight brown hair. It would have been uncharitable, but true, to call her plain. She had the wishful, plaintive smile of someone who hopes that this is the picture that will finally turn out.

But there was nothing plaintive about her voice. It was as different from Angel's as a bassoon is from a flute. And much more persuasive.

I played parts of Anna's tape again and then parts of Angel's. Then, with Angel droning in my ears, I drove west, wondering what the hell the Burned-Over District was.

"The Burned-Over District?" Bernie said. "You've got to be kidding. You mean to tell me you don't remember the counties of the Burned-Over District?"

"No, Bernie," I said wearily. "What were they?" I inwardly gritted my teeth and groaned, hoping Bernie wouldn't use the question as a cue for one of his famous lists.

"Let's see, Chautauqua, Genesee, Wyoming," Bernie began. I settled in for a long winter's night. Once, in a liquor store, I made the mistake of asking Bernie why he was buying a bottle of vodka. Then I stood there, eyes glazing over and my life passing me by, while Bernie listed at least thirty drinks that boasted vodka as their elixir vitae. Lists are a weakness of graduate students.

"And the cities too," Bernie continued happily, holding up five more fingers and picking up steam. "Utica, Rochester-"

"Utica," I interrupted. "New York." Something was coming back to me.

"And New York, of course. Not at first, though."

"I mean, these are all in New York."

"New York State" Bernie corrected me. Like all born New Yorkers, Bernie only used "New York" to refer to the city. Everything else was a featureless landscape, fit only for pity and not too much of that.

"Bear with me, Bernie," I said. "It's been a long day. Why was it called the Burned-Over District?"

"The fires of revival," he said dramatically, tugging a hand through his coils of Brillo-like hair and taking some of it with him. "They burned there more or less nonstop in the early nineteenth century. Shame on you, with a degree in comparative religions. That's where it all started. Haven't you read Whitney Cross's book?"

"What's it called?"

"The Burned-Over District," Bernie said with a hint of disappointment. "You could have guessed that, you know. I think maybe you ought to come back to school." Bernie's school career had spanned almost two decades and five degrees, and he still hadn't found his major in life.

"Later," I said. "Eighteen-twenties, right? Early revivalists. A reaction against European Calvinism. Predestination."

"Predestination was a terrible idea," Bernie said. "Only a few will be saved. The rest will roast in hell through eternity, shriveling on the spit. It doesn't make any difference how you live your life, how many alms you give or prayers you pray. If you're gonna fry, you're gonna fry." Bernie manipulated his large hands as though marionettes dangled from them, and made a sizzling noise. "Not much of a religion for a country where all men and women were supposed to be created equal. Also, not much of a religion for capitalists." Bernie was ensconced happily several notches to the left of Chairman Mao.

"Why not for capitalists?"

"Nineteenth-century capitalists were highly result-driven. They hadn't been introduced to Japanese principles of management yet. They needed a religion that allowed them to get results. So anyway, as you probably remember, the American Methodists and Baptists junked predestination in favor of free-will doctrines, the New Light doctrines, that let people have a say in whether they were going to burn or not. You could just accept Christ as your savior, and, bang, you were born again. It didn't matter if you'd been predetermined for hell the first time around; when you were reborn, you started over. The spiritual equivalent of coming to the New World. A brilliant, simple concept. Perfect for an age of revolution."

"And the preachers of the Burned-Over District took the New Light doctrines and began cranking out new religions."

"Dozens of them," Bernie said with relish, holding up his fingers again. "It must have been something in the water. Lots of Arminian doctrines, Joseph Smith and the Mormons, Millerites and, later, Seventh-Day Adventists, Shakers, the Oneida Colony-real communists, by the way-"

"Yeah, and look where it got them. Making silverware."

"What, communists are supposed to eat with their fingers? They practiced free love, too, and controlled conception at the same time. Somehow. You want some wine?"

"I thought you'd never ask."

"I thought we might wait for Joyce."

"You wait for Joyce. Where is she, anyway?"

"Still at the hospital." He got up to go to the kitchen. "I can't tell you how nice it is to need a corkscrew for a change," he said. "Nothing worth drinking comes with a screw-off cap."

Bernie and Joyce were living in a standard student apartment on the fringes of Westwood, walking distance from UCLA, where she worked and he pursued his sixth degree, in a field seemingly completely unrelated to his previous five. The smell of baking lasagna floated in from the kitchen. I canvassed the books on the bulging rattan bookshelves from Pier One while Bernie fished noisily around in drawers and finally popped the cork. "Bernie," I called, "it wasn't all completely kosher Christian, was it? I seem to remember some fishier stuff."

"Mainly Christian," he yelled, clinking some glasses together promisingly. "There were some Swedenborgians rattling around, practicing mesmerism and phrenology on anyone who was willing to sit still, but they certainly thought of themselves as Christians. Lots of mediums, spiritualists popping up all over the place. They would have been horrified if you'd suggested they weren't Christian. Just because it's Christian doesn't mean it's not fishy, Simeon." He came in with a full glass in each hand and the bottle tucked under his right arm, and sat very carefully on the floor without being able to use his hands or to move his right arm from his side. Only then did he put the glasses on the table. Eighteen years of college, and he was still helpless. "What is it with you and the Burned-Over District?"

"Little girls," I said, sipping the wine. It could have used a few minutes to breathe but it wasn't going to get them. "Something about little girls and voices from beyond."

Bernie looked at me in a shrewd fashion and then turned to survey the bookshelves, one hand clutching a white-stockinged foot. Bernie had always worn white socks. "Little girls," he said, drinking deeply out of the glass in his other hand. "Two little girls. Knox or Fox or Pox or something, maybe Fitzgerald." He scooted over on his rear and reached up for a book with the hand that had clutched the foot. Bernie wasn't one to put down a glass.

"Knox or Fox or Fitzgerald?"

"Frances Fitzgerald. Cities on a Hill. Got a terrific summary of the Burned-Over District." He flipped through the end of the book. "Fox," he said triumphantly. Margaret and Katie Fox. About twelve and fifteen, I don't know which was which, farmer's daughters, famous for their ability to communicate with the spirit world through the ghost of a dead man who haunted their family's house."

"Now I remember," I said. "They had double-jointed toes."

"They had toes like tympani," Bernie said. "If they'd been born in this century they would have played them in a band. They popped their toes like mad under the table and interpreted the noises as rappings from their friendly ghost. They were very big in Rochester."

"I'll bet they were a hit in Utica too. Who was running the show?"

"Must have been their parents. Raking it in, too. I think the little girls came up with the trick themselves. Mommy and daddy just handled the receipts."

"I don't think my little girl came up with her trick herself."

"And which little girl is this?" Bernie poured some more wine. His glass was already empty.

I told him about the Revealing.

"I've seen posters," he said promptly. "Big color shots of mother and daughter. Mostly ripping off Raphael for composition. You know, those circular Madonnas and Child. How did the Revealing work?"

"That's sort of a new twist."

" The only thing older than the old story is the new twist.' That's F. Scott Fitzgerald. What is it?"

"She's supposed to be a channel."

"Spare me," Bernie said. "There are enough dull people in the world without millions of equally dull disembodied spirits popping up and putting in their two cents' worth every time some actress closes her eyes. What are the criteria for becoming a disembodied spirit, anyway? Do they get degrees? Does some panel certify them? How do we know we don't get the worst of the bunch? How do we know they haven't been disembodied because they were bores and liars? Being disembodied doesn't sound to me like something you get for good behavior. And if they're so terrific, how come they're hanging around waiting to get a chance to talk to us? It sounds sort of like spending eternity at a pay phone, waiting for some change to drop out so you can dial a number at random. And only knowing one area code, and not a very good area code at that."

"Bernie," I said, "I'm only giving you the party line."

"Campus is full of these jerks," he said. "It used to be you could go over to Kerckhoff, get your synapses jangled on coffee, and talk about Kierkegaard or something. Now it's all these bananas with clear eyes and turbans listening to New Age music on nonanimal headphones and humming along."

"It's been a while since I've seen any animal headphones. What are they? Little imitation dog ears?"

"You know what I mean. Not even any real rubber, it's like those little faucets hurt the trees or something. And the way they dress, Simeon. Remember how hard we used to work to look a little sloppy? These kids dress like actuarial tables. Put a bunch of them together and they look like a graph illustrating the contents of the typical middle-class airhead's closet." Bernie had somehow managed to convince himself that he wasn't middle-class.

"Well, so what?" I said more quarrelsomely than I had intended. "We wore blue jeans as a uniform of nonconformity and learned to meditate. I remember saying a one-syllable word over and over until I fell asleep, and when I woke up, trying to convince myself that I'd had a mystical experience. It was the religion of the month, and the smart ones wore it out in three weeks. Now we've got channels and fire-walking and Shirley MacLaine. I'm not sure there was a new religion every fifteen minutes in the fifties, but there have been a couple of thousand since."

"You know the theories," Bernie said. "New religions tend to arise in times of transition, when old values are being challenged or are wearing out. That leaves out the fifties. Christianity was first a Jewish response to the oppression of Rome, and then, centuries later, a Roman adaptation to the decline of the empire. Luther arose as the political systems of Europe began to fall apart. Et cetera. It's all too neat for me. I take a messier view of history."

"And the Burned-Over District?"

"Society in transition with a vengeance. The Revolution only fifty years old, immigrants streaming in from Europe, people still worried about violence in the streets every time a president's party lost the election, and the country beginning to fall apart at the seams over slavery. People talk about two hundred years of American stability, the peaceful transference of power and all that, as though it actually happened. This country wasn't even a hundred years old when it self-destructed. It wasn't until Lincoln appropriated what he called War Powers and turned the presidency into a functioning kingship, and then sent Grant to crush the South, that things settled down."

"Bernie," I said, "you can't sympathize with freedom and the pre-Civil War South at the same time. Don't get sidetracked. You're being very helpful."

He sat back, a little surprised. "I am?"

"So where do all the new religions go? And don't say heaven."

It was the kind of question he loved. He drank a full glass of wine for lubrication while he gathered his thoughts. I poured for us both.

"As we said, they tend to arise in times of social change, when people have begun to doubt that the world will automatically continue to obey the million or so rules that keep them safe in their dinky little houses. Cults usually either fervently embrace the values that are being threatened- like, say, the Muslim and Christian fundamentalists do these days-or fervently challenge them, as did the original Christians and the Oneida Colony, to choose a couple of examples.

"Most religions are founded by a single charismatic individual. He or she, as Anthony F. C. Wallace says, has an experience, a hallucination, a moment of divine inspiration, an encounter with a greater force. Moses and the burning bush, Muhammad and the voice, Joseph Smith and the book of gold. The leader is changed by the experience and communicates it. Some of his listeners become converts." He picked up the book and flipped back a couple of pages to an underlined passage: "Listen, here's Fitzgerald paraphrasing Wallace: 'Some of these converts experience an ecstatic vision such as their master had, while others are convinced by rational arguments, and still others by reasons of expediency.' Boy, I'll say. The converts organize and then, almost inevitably, encounter some form of opposition.' In fact, they need the opposition. It solidifies their internal discipline and gives them a them-against-us attitude. We're so terrific we frighten them and they have to oppress us, but, oh boy, one of these days… Look at the Old Testament for the best example. It's one long wail of oppression, the longest protest song on record." He put Fitzgerald on the shelf, spilling wine as he did it.

"And then what happens?"

"Simeon, you know all this stuff already."

"What do you want me to do, Bernie, talk to myself? What's the problem, is it time to rotate the lasagna?"

"Then one of three things can happen. Either the religion adapts to a more mainstream position, or the society changes to embrace the religion's position, or both. Usually both, actually. Or the religion disappears. It's not that much different from any social movement. The Mormons moved west and dropped polygamy. The Millerites somehow survived the day in 1841 that Christ was supposed to show up, although their leader got canned and they changed their name to Adventists after they came down from the mountain, which must have been a pretty embarrassing trip. Imagine telling your neighbors that the world was about to end and then having to go home and mow the lawn."

"So most religions that aren't fundamentalist start out radical and then move to the right."

"Sure. They have to be radical at the beginning to attract a core of converts. Then, when they want to attract a much larger number of converts-when they start looking for a real power base-they have to settle down a little bit. It's like a presidential campaign working its way through the primaries. They start out all sharp edges and ringing challenges and then get worn smooth as they approach the convention. Those that don't, or can't because their primary appeal is to a noncentrist minority, drop out."

"The Burned-Over District produced some social movements too. In addition to the religions, I mean."

"Practically every important American movement of the nineteenth century. Abolition, temperance, educational reform, feminism-"

"What about feminism?" said a woman's voice from the kitchen. "Bernie, are you being boring?"

"I don't know," Bernie said. "I wasn't listening. You'd have to ask Simeon."

I got up and toted the other bottle of wine to the kitchen door. Bernie had finished the first. "On the contrary," I said to the woman standing at the oven. "He's been a veritable display of fireworks."

"He's all over the sky," she admitted. "What he needs is some direction." She closed the oven and held out a hand. I'm Joyce," she said, "and you're Simeon."

"What a domestic entrance," Bernie said from behind me. "I didn't even know the back door worked."

"It's still raining," she said. "I parked in the garage and ran for it." She was about thirty-six, maybe a year older than Bernie, with a pleasant, no-nonsense face, faded blue eyes, and a thin, high-bridged nose. She wore a white coat. "Sorry I'm late," she said. "I've wanted to meet you for a long time. You didn't get him onto agrarianism, did you?"

"Not yet."

"Good. If I hear one word about the Green Revolution and more productive strains of rice, I'm going out for pizza."

"It's important," Bernie said mildly. "We either increase the productivity of the land or you'll have to ship them lasagna."

"I think I'd prefer cooking to listening. What have we here?" She indicated the bottle in my hand.

"Merlot."

"Ducky. Looks like Bernie's already gargled with some. There must be another bottle somewhere."

"Hidden under the couch," Bernie said.

"Well, Simeon, why don't you open that one, and Bernie can set the table, such as it is, and I'll do the salad."

"Joyce is organized," Bernie said, sorting silverware. "When we pack for a trip she pins my socks together."

"Bernie's idea of packing is to empty his drawers onto the floor and then push the suitcase in front of him, wide open, until it's full. When we get there he never has any sunglasses or toothpaste, but his books are packed alphabetically by author."

"Good," I said, worrying at the cork with the world's flimsiest corkscrew. "I was afraid he was still trying to figure out the Dewey Decimal System. Bernie and I lived together once. Whole libraries vanished into the void."

"Gang up on me," Bernie said from the other room. "I like the attention."

"He does," she said. "He's worse than my patients."

"You're a gerontologist."

"Ask her about the graying of America," Bernie called. "Then, when she gets going, I can talk about the Green Revolution and she'll never notice."

"This is a two-issue relationship," Joyce said. "Gerontology and whatever Bernie's talking about at the time."

I poured her some wine. "Sounds interesting."

"I love it. I was way too focused before I met him. You have to learn to listen to him, though. It took me about six months before I learned I could change channels just by mentioning some other buzzword. That's the wonderful thing about Bernie. He's got more channels than a cable TV box."

"He's on twenty-four hours a day, too."

She grinned at me and gave me the appraising glance a woman saves for her lover's oldest friends. "And you've got as many degrees as Bernie and you're using them to be a detective," she said. "Where have we gone wrong, the mothers of America?"

"We'll talk about that over dinner, okay?"

"Fine," she said. "Anything but the Green Revolution."

"So," I said later as the lasagna steamed on the plates. "How do you track a doctor?"

"Track a doctor?" Joyce said in a suspicious tone, instantly joining the Physicians' United Front Against Everybody Else. "How do you mean?"

"Let's just say I wanted to make sure that someone who says he's a doctor really is one. Can I call the American Medical Association or something?"

"Used to be you could," she said, ''but it's unconstitutional now. Has been for some time."

"The AMA is unconstitutional?" Bernie said with his mouth full, getting up to go to the kitchen.

"No, of course not. The AMA is as constitutional as the Supreme Court, and about half as lively. It's requiring doctors to join that's unconstitutional. Used to be every doctor had to be a member. Now it's only about half."

"So you mean there's no central data bank for doctors?"

"Well," she said, "what's a doctor?"

"What do you mean, what's a doctor?" Bernie put a fresh glass of wine down in front of me. We were working through it pretty fast. "A doctor is somebody who wears a white coat and cures people. A doctor is somebody who's not a nurse and works in a hospital."

"There are doctors who do nothing but research. There are doctors who go straight into admin and never see a patient. Christ, there are chiropractors, glorified masseuses who call themselves doctors and crack spines for a living. Even worse, there are people who take M.D.'s only to go on and become lawyers so they can specialize in making doctors look bad in court, the scumbags. Is there a central data bank that includes all those people? No."

"Swell," I said. "That's just what I didn't want to hear."

I must have looked dejected. "It's made more difficult," she added, thawing slightly, "by the fact that doctors are certified to practice on the state level. There's no comprehensive central registry that contains all the state certifications."

Bernie bustled nervously, a specialty of his, before sitting in the chair opposite me and lifting his glass. "Suppose you're working in a hospital," he said helpfully, "and someone applies to practice there. How do you check him or her out?" He drank.

"You start with the school," Joyce said. "He or she had to take an M.D. But of course, you have to know what school it was." She raised her glass to her lips and then sputtered, spraying wine onto the table. "Wait," she said, wiping her chin. "I tell a lie. There is a central data bank for everyone who graduates with an M.D. It's run by the AMA, and it's in Chicago. It doesn't tell you whether people ever practiced or not, just whether they graduated. I mean, they may not ever be certified or hang out shingles, such a quaint term, but they've got the right letters after their names."

"Could you check that for me?"

"I guess so. What name?"

"Richard Merryman. An internist, or supposed to be. Living in California but not licensed here."

"What's he do, then?"

"He's the private physician to a little girl."

Bernie raised an eyebrow and looked interested. "That little girl?"

"That's not legal, not if he's not licensed," Joyce said in a tone of righteous outrage.

"I don't think this guy cares very much what's legal."

"Does he dispense drugs?"

"I don't know."

"If he does, he's got to be registered with the DEA in Washington. Oops, there's another list. Harder to check, though."

"Could you do it through the hospital?" Bernie asked.

"This is a bad guy?" Joyce demanded.

"If I'm right, he's about as bad a guy as I've ever met," I said.

Joyce toyed with her lasagna. "I'll give it a shot," she said. "All they can say is no."

An hour later, at the door, I kissed Joyce good-bye and gave Bernie a hug. It had turned into that kind of an evening. We'd gone through both the bottles I had brought and one with a screw-top that held some kind of white plonk from Argentina or someplace. Bernie had finally gotten to talk about the Green Revolution.

I talked my way past the cop at the entrance to Topanga Canyon by showing him my driver's license with the Topanga Skyline address on it. Bad mudslides, he said. No one but residents allowed in. He implied that the roads could be closed completely in the morning if the rain kept up. The rain was supposed to keep up.

The wine and the good fellowship had dissolved the knot of unease in my stomach, and the Russell Arms didn't exert much appeal. I needed to pack some stuff, and when I got out of the car I was toying with the idea of sleeping at home and finding my way out over the fire roads in the morning, if necessary.

No odor at the bottom of the driveway; I silently thanked Dexter, wherever he might be. Halfway up the drive I saw that the lights were on again and did my best to accelerate, anticipating Roxanne. I tried to remember whether there was any beer in the refrigerator.

The door was open. Roxanne didn't like the cold. She wouldn't have left the door open.

I went back down to Alice and got a gun out of the dash compartment, then climbed quietly back up and went into the house. It had been thoroughly and ambitiously tossed.