ew cult deprogrammers these days would even try to take someone from Ex Libris. Hardly any even call themselves deprogrammers, anymore. “Exit counselor” is the preferred title, in keeping with the warmer, fuzzier new psychology. A human brain must be more than just Descartes’ materialist cognitive model, or its feelings wouldn’t get so hurt by the truth.
My methods were not popular, but they worked. Most of my business was by referral. The clients who came to me had exhausted every other hope of recovering their loved ones. When I could not myself convince them to accept that perhaps they were healthier, more enlightened, perhaps even happy, with their new lifestyle, then I had them sign my waiver and went to work.
Ex Libris was a hard target. They didn’t greet at airports or convention centers or lurk outside euthanasia booths. They didn’t panhandle or turn tricks. Mostly, they meditated to the Master’s audiobooks while toiling in digital sweatshops up and down the coast.
Their leader was a creative writing professor. Dr. Preston Marble used the classics—“guided” meditation, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, protein starvation, mild hallucinogens and traumatic writing assignments. Ex Libris grew out of Marble’s writing seminars and his “Awakened Editions” series of classic books annotated for neurotics desperately yearning to become psychopaths, harvesting the most hopeless wanna-bes, fans and impressionable victims into a militant bibliomancy cult.
Marble’s guide to story structure translated more easily into a practical bible than the Bible, complete with interactive commandments. Every devotee had to compose an “antibiography” of everything they were not and never would be. On average, they ran to five hundred thousand words composed on no sleep and amphetamine-laced oatmeal. When your Editor finally approved your antibiography, you had to burn it and throw the ashes in the ocean or eat it.
If they used Allah, Buddha or Jesus, they’d be on FBI watch-lists, but to the outside world, they’re just a fucking book club.
Sometimes, I can dress up as a senior cult official and pull them out with no headaches. This outfit had no slack, so I cut their DSL line, then knocked on their door. Four surfers in each one-bedroom unit at all times. A van came every other day to rotate them out. Eight more places like this, just in this part of town.
Cable guy uniform. Toolbelt. Wig and mustache, cotton plugs in my cheeks, lifts in my shoes. I chloroformed the geek who answered the door, caught him, threw the deadbolt and dragged him into the living room.
No furniture except for four workstations and a couple futons in the corner. Lysol, incense and macrobiotic farts. Two were awake and pecking at their boards. Another lay on a futon with headphones on. The one I wanted.
She wore a biofeedback harness and a Cranio-Electrical Stimulation cap. They listen to his heartbeat and EEG mixed with his audiobook lectures while they work. The more her brain activity conforms to Marble’s template, the more mildly pleasurable zaps she gets from the cap.
And all while copy-editing or revising the mass media equivalent of lead-painted, asbestos infant’s teething rings. If you’ve ever watched a slab of direct-to-video dreck or mind-numbing scripted reality show patter and wondered how sane human beings can create such empty noise, well… sane people don’t.
The system also tracks bodily functions and location for the home office. Anyone unplugging their unit or wandering out of range triggers an alarm and the Editors come running.
I unplugged her and took off her headphones—Marble’s sleepy bullroarer voice reading something about an anarchist exploding himself at Greenwich Observatory. She was semi-catatonic, dead on her feet. I didn’t even need the chloroform. I stood her up and escorted her to the balcony.
Someone knocked on the front door, then tried the knob.
Out on the balcony overlooking the alley. My assistant waited on the roof of our parked van, ready to catch the product. I bagged her and lowered her over the railing.
Carl caught the bag and gave me a hand down onto the van, then jumped down and caught the product, dropping her in the back. In and out in less than two minutes.
We took her out to Imperial County, to the Olde Desert Inn. It was abandoned long before I set up shop, and no one ever happened by. Two miles off the Interstate, at a dead place that never quite became a town. You can see anyone coming from five minutes away, watch satellites pass overhead at night.
As soon as we got the product strapped down in the honeymoon suite, Carl went home to his family and I got busy. My client had paid a big premium for a rush job. He wanted his wife back. I had to open up the product and find her.
She had the kind of bright, nervous beauty that you feel sparking at you just before you look her way. Smart, fine features; good bones showing too starkly through her pale, jaundiced skin. Avid, hungry eyes.
Real deprogrammers, the old school guys, kept their techniques under wraps like stage magicians, but it’s almost always some variation on the old interrogation, aversion therapy model. I didn’t have any tricks, training, dirty little secrets.
I didn’t interrogate them or break them down the way the burnout FBI agents and MK-ULTRA stooges who started our game did it. I didn’t have to. I was more of an assassin. I captured and killed the target with my magic bullet. The product died and the person was reborn, saved by the Elixir.
I liked to measure out dosages not just to body size, age and health, but to degree of indoctrination. I usually interviewed the client before, but this one was unresponsive. Semi-catatonic. She’d get up and go where you pushed her, but there was nobody home.
A quick physical turned up scalp scabs from constant electrical shocks and bruised track marks from recent and intensive IV abuse. Her pupils were responsive and pulse fine, but someone had already worked her.
I wanted to wait, but I gave her the shot. Her pulse spiked, then flattened out. I checked her restraints. If she didn’t come around in an hour, I’d give her the second dose I’d prepped.
It wasn’t therapy. I studied psychology, but I’m no doctor. Nobody can teach you how to raise the dead. To join any cult, from the Masons to Aum Shinrikyo, you have to die. The old you dies and is buried inside you to fertilize the budding of the new you. To resurrect them, I just had to go digging. The Elixir was a bullet, but it was also my shovel. It’s just easy enough, the results miraculous enough, that you’d kid yourself you know what you’re doing.
Under the Elixir, you are outwardly conscious. You speak when spoken to. You obey. You don’t ask questions. You know nothing but what you are told. You are utterly suggestible. I could make you blow me, hijack a bus and drive it into a nuclear power plant. It’s not like hypnosis, where the idiot on stage wants to act like a chicken. What the product wanted, who they were, what they would or wouldn’t do… all of it dies and goes away. In its place… whatever I put into them.
But she was doing it wrong.
She took me so completely by surprise that I almost didn’t see that I’d found what I’d always been looking for. Someone who could show me what it was like to be nothing.
She babbled in French, faster than I could understand. Then, “The stars beneath the sea… Do you remember before you were born? You remember what it was like?… I’d give anything if you could send me back….”
Usually, the product has to be coaxed out of the clouds. Sometimes it helps to guide them out with imagery; childhood snapshots as stepping stones, recreating the life history with a big red editorial pen.
But this product didn’t need me to set the scene. The walls of the motel room turned to stained canvas flats in the wings of a musty black cathedral.
The ceiling vanished in a jumble of scenery dangling from cables. Some I recognized–-the apartment, the Ex Libris Chapterhouse, the beach at night, a Hillcrest townhouse—but there were hundreds of others, an armory of scenes. Flakes of corroded varnish fluttered down to settle on her hair like golden snow.
“Before your script was written? Before the Plot had sharpened and bent and broken you to its ends.” She winced, trying to smile. “If you’re here, you must be an actor….”
“Then you’re an actress?”
Her laughter shivered flurries of paintflakes from above. “If you’re alive, you must act. Are you so sure you’re alive?” She tossed her head and fussed with the ash-roses embroidered in the sleeves of her gray gown. The fabric was dull yet subtly iridescent, like a shed snakeskin. “I like this one ever so much more than the last play….”
“What play was that? What was your role?”
“I was a mirror for a man to admire his own mask. So few real roles for women, now as ever… I loved my Lord the King more than my husband. I had forsaken all others to become a thought in my Lord’s mind. But then he revealed to me my particular purpose…”
“And what purpose is that?”
She knelt before the pool that had been only a square chalk outline on the floor of the stage. “To murder him,” she said. The buckled, warped boards were now pitted umber flagstones, the corsages of stained paper extravagantly sexual lilies on still, emerald water.
“Do you want to be free of him? Of… all this?”
“Oh, he’s no burden. His sinister hand stopped my dagger as if it were a feather. By his fear and by his blood, I knew he was but a pretender. No, the one I want to be free of, no one can escape.”
“Who’s that?”
She leaned in close and whispered, “The Plot.”
Looking up into the gallery, she hunched closer to me. I could feel my warmth leeching away into her. “I like this one ever so much better. So many places to hide… Do you not know the French Play?”
I shuddered and told her no.
“No matter, the lines read you, as it were. But we must enter! The call! Here, you must don your mask!”
The theater throbbed with the tolling of a vast, leaden bell. She shoved the cold, dry thing into my hands. Before I could look at it, I had pressed it to my face. Shadowy hands came out of the dark to guide us up twisting stairs and through a velvet miasma of rotting curtains into a cold white light….
We lay side by side upon the bed. Her pulse was steady. Her eyes were empty.
I thought better of giving her the second shot, decided instead on a serious sedative. But when I turned around, the syringe was gone.
It was in her hand. Then it was in my neck.
Before 9/11, the airport was much more than a place to wait in line and get searched. It was also really easy to steal people’s luggage.
I did it to pick up quick cash after I dropped out of college. It beat waiting to be expelled once my misuse of the clinical psychology department’s resources was uncovered, or once the new law requiring piss tests for financial aid went into effect.
At LAX, the passengers would crowd up to the belt even if their luggage was nowhere in sight, so if something went round the loop more than twice, it was probably unclaimed. Missed passenger connection, misrouted baggage, or maybe just a protracted restroom visit. Regardless, within ten seconds of spotting my quarry, I could have it out the turnstile door and into my friend’s waiting car.
My friend. Naomi was philosophy on a pre-law track and still doing swimmingly. We had little in common except she enjoyed drugs even more than me, which pretty much guaranteed her at least some sort of regional title. Strikingly homely, smarter than me, and a fry-guide non pareil. Any time you wanted to drop acid and go walkabout up the coast, she was down, if she didn’t have a paper due. I told myself she hung out with me because she was writing a paper about me.
So this one time, I cased the claim corrals in the international terminal, which was always sketchy and seldom worth it. Flights from Hong Kong, South America or the Middle East, where customs or immigration might hold them up for me, were also searched the most often. Even back then, they had cameras everywhere, and sometimes someone was watching them. I did a paper on recognition cues that guide our treatment of people we see as young/old, rich/poor, ugly/pretty, hostile/friendly, threatening/helpless, etc. The grabs started as part of those experiments. Everyone is a bigot, but a memorable prop or stereotypical mannerisms were cues that one noticed even above gender or race. I got a C+ and a journeyman’s degree in spycraft.
We kept a suitcase full of Iranian currency—fifteen hundred dollars after exchange—and two pounds of hash. We pursued the experiments elsewhere—shoplifting, dining and dashing, pharmaceutical burglary, etc. Much was learned.
But this last one… it was everything we hoped for and deserved.
I saw this really long, odd-shaped, expensive-looking case on a played-out Cathay Pacific from Bangkok and figured it for something fun. Maybe a musical instrument. I wasn’t looking for money, though I was broke and hungry. I wanted secrets.
I was dressed in a distressed linen suit, perfect for humid tropical climes, and a Panama hat with a snakeskin band. The dissolute young sex tourist, bringing back only viral contraband incubating where no customs agent dare search, or the callow expatriate, returning to liquidate a deceased parent’s estate before returning to kick the gong around with the ladyboys of Patpong.
Already a scrum of vultures from the next flight were converging on the belt in anticipation of a fresh bag dump, providing plenty of cover from airport security, who had not once asked to see a claim check.
I was on the far side of the belt with a clear shot for the doors. Naomi waited at the curb in her ketchup-red Sentra with a bungee-cord holding the trunk shut. I passed “security” when I noticed I’d grabbed the wrong bag. This one was beat up, dull matte-black brushed steel with three key locks on it. It was too late to turn back, so I ran with it.
Three guesses what was inside.
Naomi and I went to a Shakey’s Pizza in Culver City. Her dad was a retired cop upstate, but she learned how to pick locks to steal her classmate’s Ritalin and weed in middle school. She got it open before our pie arrived and I lost my last ball on the ancient Zardoz pinball machine.
Neither of us knew French, so we couldn’t read the greasy, piss-stinking diary. We got disgusted by the pictures of naked or near-naked Thai boys posed in rice paddies, in muddy alleys, in brothels, coatrooms, and riverbanks. Everywhere this guy went, he must have paid boys to drop trou for a photograph, prologue to fuck knows what. Maybe he paid them in something other than money, for all of them had the same dreamy, vacant expression, eyes drooping shut or fixedly staring up at the contents of their own skulls. I was never so fucking glad I couldn’t read French.
I wanted to go back to LAX and play our favorite game, Spot the Pervert, but he wouldn’t make it easy by going to security. He’d run straightaway he suspected they were onto him, I reasoned, and anyway, I got to the bottom of the suitcase and found the big bottles of weird yellow-gray powder.
Naomi wanted to snort it. I wanted to consult the diary first. Only the thought that it could be cremains, deadly insecticide or uranium, dissuaded us from a trial bump.
And the rest, as they say, is history…. When they don’t want to talk anymore about how the chance discovery became destiny, or whom you ran over on the way.
In less than six weeks, I had learned enough French to know what I had, and what kind of monster I took it from. Don’t believe that I tried to turn evil to good, to redeem it or myself, by going underground and turning the Elixir to a cult deprogramming tool. I could’ve become the greatest pornographer in history or a revolutionary therapist, a salesman, anything…. But I only wanted to learn what people were made of.
Another experiment.
In the interest of science, Naomi and I tried an intramuscular injection of fifty micrograms in solution of the Elixir. That was his name for it.
I don’t remember anything after that. Naomi was gone when I came down. I never saw her again. I freaked out and took off and I hid out here and there and everywhere, shedding myself on the road until I was only the Deprogrammer. I believed that the euphoric migraines that overtook me almost like menstrual clockwork every few months were flashbacks, withdrawal symptoms, but I never tried it again.
Using the powdered Elixir, I delivered fifty-two prisoners of cults and successfully converted all but two of them into reasonable facsimiles of their old selves, minus a traumatic scar or an empty hole that made a cult seem like a good idea. I fixed them.
After four years, my supply of the Elixir was nearly used up. I had a sample tested once and learned it was a fungal derivative, but I’d never successfully cultivated the spores. Nowhere near close to having learned anything real, I was looking at retirement.
Carl came within seconds of my recovering enough to page him. This was because he and his family lived in the motel… and also because his “family” didn’t really exist, except as an elaborate skein of posthypnotic suggestions. (Carl was my first patient. Mistakes were made.)
Nothing like this, though.
Carl let me get it out of my system. Just apologized and said he didn’t see her leave.
Nobody ever escaped from the motel before. An unrehabilitated product would go running back to the cult, which might choose to go to the police. I would have to call the client to let him know his wife was missing with a head full of nameless psychogenic drugs.
Richard Resley, PhD, was a professor of nothing so mundane as one discipline, a postmodern enfant terrible who could never be contained by one campus, let alone one bed. The first article pulled up by a Google search called him the Deacon of Deconstruction. I had to get into the double digits to find things I wished I’d known before I agreed to abduct his wife.
I deployed Carl to look for the product and drove into the city to meet with Resley.
He was being interviewed at the local public radio affiliate, but agreed to give me a few minutes between demolishing colonialist patriarchal dialectics and delineating new paradigms for a chubby ash-blond postgrad who looked ready to jump his boring bones.
He took it well.
“So, she is no longer your responsibility then.” He nodded to me, turned to go. “She is very headstrong. I trust you did your best.”
I took his arm, sure he wouldn’t want his pet coed to hear what I had to say. “I won’t try to complicate the situation any more than it is, if you’ll just tell me why you’d pay good money to have your wife deprogrammed from a cult that you still belong to.”
His face tightened. “I suppose there’s no point equivocating. My interests and Preston’s are still deeply entangled, though I was never as devoted to his philosophy as my wife.” Air-quoted philosophy, the prick.
Resley coauthored three major studies of “psychocultural engineering” with Marble two decades ago, just before he left UCSD and started his sewing circle. Never publicly connected to the cult, but the pattern was there, if you were paranoid enough to see it. “So, you get all the benefits and none of the starvation….”
“My antibiography wasn’t all that long. Preston is doing some extraordinary things with expanding human potential, and I’ve been privileged to witness some of it. Listen, this is beginning to sound an awful lot like some sort of blackmail attempt….”
“It’s not. Your wife disappeared in the middle of a session. She’s extremely suggestible….”
“I could’ve told you that,” he said. “Listen, if you’re so concerned, why not go to the police? I’m sure they’d be very thorough in locating her, once they sorted you out.” Impatiently, he sped up and crossed the street just ahead of a truck loaded with liquid CO2.
I gave up chasing after him. Just stopped and shouted in the street, “Was it you or Marble who turned her onto the French Play?”
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Resley whirled and came back up to me where I waited on the curb.
I couldn’t resist. “She dreams she’s acting in it. Says she was in another play, too, where somebody tried to get her to kill somebody—”
He hit pretty hard for a middle-aged college professor. The punch folded me into his shoulder, which shoved me back onto the curb.
His face was frozen milk. I smelled urine, and it wasn’t mine. “Stay the hell away from me or I’ll call my police. Would you like that?”
I watched him walk away. The postgrad skipped after him, looking sideways at me as she followed him to his office.
I could’ve left it alone. Nobody was paying me to press further. I didn’t like being used, but if Ex Libris wanted to play games, they would have been subtler about it. The easiest explanation, that Mrs. Resley had been a plant to spy on my methods, would explain it all if anyone had ever gotten up and walked away in the middle of an Elixir session.
One person had, and I never saw her again. And no one under the Elixir had ever successfully dragged me into their head. And I had heard only once before of the French Play, in the journal I found with the Elixir.
“And the games! Such delightful entertainments our pretty toys gave us… Never has the French Play been performed with such abandon, as my little troupe put on for the Khmer Jaune Festival. Every performance consumed a raft of Cassildas, a platoon of Thales, and taxed my art to its core. Such ecstasies, such wondrous pitiful pain! My dolls laid so bare the veiled face of power and desire that the Pallid Mask wept tears of priceless ichor and the Hidden City beckoned beyond the rotten red moons… We all saw it, and beheld the colorless, cold corona of the Crown of No Nation….”
The King In Yellow was only one more bullet point in an inventory of depravity that yawned at pedophilia and cannibalism. I tracked down and attempted to read it back when I was still trying to find out what I had, but I couldn’t tell you what the big deal was. My memory of it was like a hole in a pocket. I ran down a copy at a Xian Science Reading Room where the curator owed me a big favor.
I put out an underground APB on my car with some contacts in the repo and private security industries. I prowled the Ex Libris chapterhouses in Ocean Beach and Encinitas. I got nothing and nowhere, and hoped for better news from Carl when we met at a taco shop on PCH. He had ignored my calls all day, so I assumed he was either busy or had lost it. He was always losing things when I forgot to remind him.
He looked like he’d lost a lot more than his phone. He sat down next to me on a picnic bench out front. The surfers and landscaping grunts had all gone and the shop was deserted. On the wall, they had that mural in every taco shop, of the dead Indian prince on the woman’s lap, an Aztec Pieta….
“I found her,” he said.
I lit up. I asked her where, how, why didn’t he tell me on the phone?…
He rubbed his eye, looked absently at the smear of blood on his fingertip. He took out a picture. It was creased and faded. He stared at it, cupped in his big, shaky hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?…”
Where was she? I asked him.
“She’s everywhere,” he said, and dropped the picture on the scarred wood table. It wasn’t Regina Resley. It was a picture of an emaciated, bald effigy that it took me several seconds to recognize.
It was hard to make out just what he was saying. Words didn’t come easy, but he wanted to know what I did to him, to his daughter. Why did he have false memories of another family in the desert, and what was his real fucking name, please?
Before I could think of an answer, he let out a desolate sob and lunged at me, hands around my throat.
Did I leave that part out?
Carl. I didn’t let myself think too much about who he was or where he came from. It was so upsetting, I resented him if I even thought about it, because it never bothered him, and if anyone could fix me so I didn’t remember about Naomi either, than I would have. I was jealous of Carl, because he had someone to fix him.
Carl came looking for his daughter about a month after the Incident. I had split town and was hiding, but he was a retired cop and a widower with nothing else to do. He wanted to know where his daughter was, and since nobody else knew and I was her good friend and had fled right when she went missing, I had a lot of explaining to do.
Instead, I stabbed him in the neck with a syringe of Elixir. I was still haphazardly translating the journal with a big Larousse French dictionary, and I was seriously considering throwing all of it in the ocean and starting over.
But then I had an ideal subject. It was easy to erase memories, but putting something in its place… that took nuance. Starting with Carl, I had gone from something resembling a sleepwalker to someone who believed quite firmly in the fantasy of a normal daily life I had given him, who enjoyed the love of a family in his head every night while he lay alone in a motel room. He was probably happier with my lies than when his wife and daughter were alive.
But try to tell a man that when he’s strangling you.
None of my safewords worked. Not even the nuclear one, the name of his daughter. Breathless, I gasped them in his ear, but he was a me-killing machine. More in sorrow than in panic, I took out the injector pen I’d mixed for Mrs. Resley and stuck it in his left armpit.
He went limp, crushing me on the table. I rolled out from under him and sat down, composing my thoughts. The taco shop workers watched me through the window. Cars passed on the street.
All my work ruined. Her name should have shut him down, but he had found it, and come back for me. I couldn’t accept that my programming had simply come undone.
To rebuild what he was would be impossible… his identity was a patchwork stitched together ad hoc over the last four years. I could leave him blank, but someone would come looking. A man with no memory is interesting, while a man with sad memories can’t be buried fast enough. Far easier to restore him to where he was when I found him, with a few hasty updates to account for the missing time.
You’ve been drinking and drifting ever since you found out your daughter Naomi had died of a drug overdose. But now, it’s time to go home, to pick up the pieces and live your life.
I gave him a little more off the top of my head, then put some cash in his wallet. I asked him who did this to him. Who gave him this picture of Naomi, digitally dated four years ago.
Even under the Elixir, he could not, or would not say. The words he seemed to mouth but could not speak aloud, I could only guess that they were, Your Master.
I spent the next several hours hiding out from the Plot, trying to figure out what to do next. Waiting to see who tried to fuck me up next.
Reading the French Play.
Like naked celebrity photos or instructions for making a nuclear weapon, you can find no end of fakes and fragments of the French Play on the Internet. But all the versions out there are counterfeits, malware or worse. All the printed English translations, burned and scandalized, omitted much, and if an editor only suffered a stroke or a nervous breakdown in the process, he was lucky.
I felt something for Regina Resley that I had not for any of my other products. She was beautiful and smarter than me and she stood at the heart of everything I had thrown away my life to discover. How could I not fall for her?
That’s what I told myself, but I loved her as I loved mystery, and because chasing after her lost me in a story less pathetic than my own.
There’s just the stories, and people weave them to trap a bit of reality and tame it, and people get trapped in the stories and think they’re taming the world and playing it like a game to get what they want, like shaking a gourd and doing a dance to make it rain. Sympathetic magic. Spill blood to make it rain, so it’ll rain blood.
Stories do all that for us, and what do they ask in return?
I didn’t own a copy. But I figured I for sure knew who did. The condo in Hillcrest had three pet grad students in it. None of them were wired Ex Libris drones, just the new crop of coeds from which Resley had once picked Regina. No wonder he didn’t miss her.
I didn’t have to search Resley’s office. It was on the desk in plain sight, nicely annotated with Post-it tongues sticking out of the crumbling, acid-etched pages. He was nowhere to be found, so I sat behind his desk, donned a pair of rubber gloves and started to read. I don’t think I got through the dramatis personae before I blacked out again.
I sat upon a threadbare throne hidden behind a moth-eaten screen as the curtain fell. A river of parchment skin and brittle bones rattled applause out of the void beyond the footlights.
“You were marvelous,” she said. She took the gold-trimmed tails of my cloak and slit them with a straight razor.
My hands went to my face and touched the mask. It wouldn’t come off. Her hand on mine was colder than the razor. “It’s a short intermission. Do you want them to see your naked face?”
I had to search for my own voice. The Lines hung in the air like the promise of plague. “In the… in the last play… your husband hired me to turn you against your master….”
Her hands went to her face. The razor sheared away a wing of her bangs. “Oh, look what you’ve made me do… You’re gnawing at my motivation again.”
“I’m sorry, Regina. I only wanted to know….”
Her eyes went blank and blind. “We’re here now, and that’s all that matters. We don’t ever have to leave… so long as we play.”
She returned to tattering my wardrobe, hysteria whickering in her throat so I didn’t dare press. “All of this to be gotten through… all these scenes… As if any of it matters… But our reward…”
“What do we get? What comes at the end?”
She looked up from her work and kissed my frigid mask. “Why… you do!”
“In the next act… I can’t recall the lines… but you… you’re going to murder someone?…”
“Imagine that! I couldn’t murder my own shadow…. Even when She almost… No, you won’t…”
Agitated, she cast about with the razor. “He’s not going to find me here. You won’t tell, will you? If he doesn’t, if we get to the end, then we can go and live where everything has already happened, but we’ll remember, won’t we? The black starshine won’t… The sun beneath the sea… It won’t forget us, because we’ll stop it, we’ll never have to be born again and we’ll stop them, the stopping stoppers… stop…” The words seemed to come apart in her mind. She looked at me in alarm, the razor clenched in a white, birdlike fist, her soft white wrists cobwebbed with hesitation scars. “Oh my Lord, I’m undone…. I have forgotten my lines! He’s coming to correct us….”
The screen around us was hoisted into the gallery. The throne withdrew on whimpering casters with me on it, leaving her trembling alone on the boards when the curtain lifted. She threw up her hands and told me to run just before she dissolved in the pale yellow light.
I looked up from the book, my thumb jammed into the last act. He must’ve come while I was… reading? Sleeping? He sat on the leather couch under the picture window overlooking the park. He was wearing the same plum worsted wool suit he had on at school, which was fortunate. It hid the stains.
Resley had no face. Everything from ear to ear, from hairline to chin, was stripped away in a frenzy of slashing, flaying strokes that left only ribbons of gristle dangling from his naked skull. The worst of the mess lay strewn across transcripts of phone conversations with me that lay in his lap.
Two grad students were waiting in the hall. “We’ve called the police. You really should wait here.” They didn’t stop me leaving. They shot me with their phones as I fled the scene covering my face with the French Play.
Marble was slated to speak to a few thousand at the Extensions Festival, a massive New Age, human potential snake oil block party on the Prado, by the zoo. I left my car in the zoo lot and cut through eucalyptus groves and twisting canyons to the backside of Balboa Park.
Yellow-gray clouds draped over the park, clammy fever sheets gravid with rain that couldn’t fall. Shadows seeped up out of the decaying Spanish colonnades, alcoves choked with morbid satyrs and defaced saints, faces gouged off and bearded in graffiti and guano. Hotter in the shady arcades than under the stricken sun.
I heard the watery echo of amplified voices lapping at the walls everywhere in the park, but it took me a long time to locate it. A cohort of grad students surrounded the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. A screenwriting seminar had bussed their dupes in, so the crowd overflowed the pavilion and swamped the Prado and forked around the goldfish pond to back up against the botanical gardens. And everywhere among them, you could see the earbuds of the ones already listening to his voice, his brainwaves, telling them how to be not just the heroes, but the authors of the story of their lives.
They followed me right into the Model Railroad Museum. One of them shot me in the hand. The projectile was the size of a pub dart. My hand went rubbery and spasmed out from under me as I climbed up onto the tabletop model. I tripped over Cajon Pass, kicked a hole in Mt. Palomar and wrecked the Santa Fe Super Chief. Ancient volunteer engineers in blue caps tried to pull me down, but I staggered towards the HO-scale downtown, intent on stomping Balboa Park, crushing the shoebox-sized replica of the Organ Pavilion and its tiny plastic Preston Marble before Regina could find him. I only made it as far as Fashion Valley. I collapsed on my face and had to be dragged out, numbly clutching two fistfuls of broken boxcars.
Tranquilizer darts. Seriously. It’s heartbreaking to devote your life to abducting people efficiently and safely, and then to be taken by sadistic amateurs.
“D’you know how you can tell you’re trapped in an inferior writer’s universe?” someone said. “Nobody can speak for more than three sentences without sounding exactly like the narrator.”
I woke up in a tiny, dusty tea room. The only window was covered up by a faded French, maybe Belgian, flag. I was a prisoner in one of the Houses of Hospitality.
Two big men with thick glasses blocked the door. A thickset man with doleful eyes and no hair of any kind on his head except for a full white handlebar mustache that hid his mouth, so his deep, overly familiar voice could have been coming from anywhere. His left hand rested on his lap like a dead pet, bandaged and splinted as it would be for a deep wound. Say stopping a knife—
“Do you know why cultures die, Mr. —?” He took a cup of tea from a bodyguard with his right hand. Nobody offered me one. “The Native Americans saw their narrative arc demolished by the more dynamic European colonial dialectic. Their myth, their story-way, was gone, and they soon followed it. They were dead inside before we put them on reservations.
“Same with modern America. All our myths gone to rust and reality TV. Fantasies of quick fame and fortune, of being something that everyone else wants to watch, of swift retribution on the lazy, the stupid, the poor. There’s no mythic resonance to daily life. That’s why everyone dreams of writing a book or a screenplay. Everyone feels one in them, that never gets out. That story they can’t tell is themselves!”
A bodyguard handed him a napkin to blot the spilled tea. “More powerful than drugs, than God or death or fear itself, are stories. With less instinct than any flatworm, we look for them to tell us what to do, how to behave, how we’re going to end up. There’re plenty of atheists in foxholes, but none without a personal mythology that gives them meaning. When life seems long and meaningless, stories make it short and exciting, make every accident into a test, into enemy action, into a Plot.”
My head throbbed from the tranquilizer. I still couldn’t feel my hand. Trying not to stare too fixedly at the teacup, I said, “I’m falling asleep again, you dick. Bullet points, please.”
He smiled. “Exposition is death,” he admitted. He tossed his empty teacup into the cold fireplace.
“Would it kill you to give me something to drink?”
The bodyguards looked at each other. One went to a tea service in the corner and graced me with lukewarm bottled water that wasn’t French. It tasted like a kiss from someone with worse breath than mine.
“People call what I do a cult, and that hurts. I help people tell their stories. I teach them to see the magic, the mythic resonance, in their daily lives. I tell them the rest of the world is full of shit, and I’m right. The disciple pays for wisdom with submission. But this isn’t a cult. Nobody here worships me. I don’t tell anyone what’s going to happen to them when they die.
“Everyone who comes to me, I help them articulate their One Story, their narrative arc, and I don’t just help them create a marketable masterpiece. I help them tell their story compellingly, because that is where they will go when they die.”
My sleepy hand wouldn’t cooperate with the clapping. “You should say that up front, more people would join up. What’s this got to do with the Resleys? You know he hired me to deprogram Regina so he could try to get her to kill you.”
He didn’t look shocked. He looked delighted. “Of course. He was only following my outline. Do you know the difference between a fringe cult and a legitimate religion?” He anticipated my obligatory smartass answer. “One dead messiah.”
“I find it hard to believe you’re having a hard time getting someone to kill you.”
“With respect, you’re not a storyteller. Regina was addicted to escapism and had no real story of her own to tell, so she naturally insinuated herself into mine. Easier to be the villain in your own story than trying to be something you can’t imagine. At least you know where the end is.”
Pointing at his mangled hand with mine, I asked, “Why didn’t you let her finish you off when you had the chance?”
“Timing is everything. Our lives are like coal. Shaped for eons in darkness to be used up in an instant. Stories are the fire in which they burn.”
“If we’re lucky. So… your… arc comes to a dramatic end, cut down by a traitorous disciple…. I think I’ve seen it before.”
“Then you know how it ends. Preston Marble the Man dies, but Marble’s Word lives on in every man. She’ll play her part.”
“She’s playing it now. She killed her husband, less than an hour’s walk from here.”
“Nobody seems to have seen her there.” He held up his phone to tab through a slew of amateur paparazzi snaps of yours truly fleeing the condo with a gray blur like a struggling dove trapped in my hand. “Just you.”
“You don’t know where she is.”
“We thought you had her, but wherever her body’s gone to ground, we’re confident she’ll rise to the occasion when the curtain goes up.”
“Why The King—”
Shaking his head vehemently, he hushed me. “Don’t.” He gathered his thoughts, fetishism warring with fear. He told his bodyguards to wait outside. “Few can bear to read it at all, and most quickly give up or are thwarted, and everyone who claims to have read it has described a different ending, with variations large and small, but no two alike… because no one, reader or player, has ever truly finished it….”
“But that’s not possible. It’s just a play, for fuck’s sake. How hard can it be to get to the end of a goddamn book?…”
“Every reader must enter the text alone. None emerge unchanged. Some never return at all. Regina is that most rara avis: a pure reader. Only the most extreme spheres of abstraction satisfied her, but once dug in, she was impossible to shake out again.
“To reach her… to break her out of her fugue and quicken her to her purpose, we needed some radical outside element to catalyze the last act. You will continue to serve our plot until your arc is complete.”
“And your arc will end with her killing you… to try to make Ex Libris a mainstream religion?…” He shrugged, all false modesty. A bodyguard watched us through the porthole window in the cottage door. I tossed my water at him.
The door flew open and they were on me before it hit him. My head hit the wall, but I saw how he caught it with his bandaged left hand. It seemed to hurt him a lot less than if someone had just stabbed him there.
“You’re not Marble,” I said, feeling brilliant.
“Well, of course not…. But I’ve played him for many years, and I’ve only ever quoted the Master. Professor Marble retired from public life three years ago, and communicates only through bibliomancy and doubles.”
Quotations selected at random from his own books on writing. “You’re willingly going to die just so he can go to his own funeral?”
It was pure hell finding something that didn’t make him smile. “He will be alive and yet mythologically dead. He will be, in point of semiotic and phenomenological fact, a living god.”
“And did you have any say in how this would… will… happen?”
“The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad. It’s one of my favorites. Have you ever?…”
I shook my head. I lie a lot. “You’re so tight with the, ah, Master… What’s he really like?”
“Could you ever hope to attain mastery so complete that when you close your eyes, your disciple opens them, not merely believing in, but being, you? That’s what he’s like. I pray to him: TEACH ME TO BE YOU. And silently, wisely, he has.”
Outside, the pipe organ was crushing the exultant final movement of Saint-Saëns’ 3rd symphony. A timid knock at the low, rounded door lifted Marble’s double out of his chair. He shuffled through ankle-deep dust, looking over his shoulder at me from the open doorway. “I imagine you’re about to be overwhelmed with remorse when you find out what your last patient has done. You’re going to become very emotional over the undoing of your perverse amateur brainwashing operation, and with the police at your door and so many ruined lives in your wake, you’ll be doing the world a favor. A real one, not like the sick games you played with helpless, vulnerable people’s minds.”
I couldn’t help but nod along. “That does sound like me. Did you write it all out for me?”
Slapping his forehead, he produced his trademark overstuffed spiral-bound journal and shook out a slip of paper from my motel. Someone had surely meditated very deeply upon my choppy block capital handwriting, and nailed it.
“How much do I owe you for this?”
Chuckling, he nodded and walked out into a monsoon of applause. Three bodyguards came into the cottage once he was clear and escorted me to a limousine. The bitter tang of mildewed paper and incense filled the cabin. I got in without making a scene.
The book was gone, but I didn’t need it. A bodyguard got in with me as the limo pulled away from the curb. He crushed me against the passenger seat. I hit and kicked to no effect. Try as I might, I couldn’t even bruise myself against him. I wasn’t there at all by the time he hooded me in a two-ply plastic yard waste bag and wrapped his arm around my neck in a truly professional sleeper hold.
I was back in the gallery. I wore a soldier’s uniform. Regina wore a tattered ochre cloak made from a ruined asbestos fire curtain.
She pulled back a drape hiding an alcove and a tarnished brazen bell cover. She lifted the cover and the room was suffused with verdigris-tinted light that seemed to rot all that it illuminated.
Underneath it, her husband’s severed, faceless head. Upon his brow, cruelly piercing it, the source of the dismal glow—a plain golden circlet transfixed with barbarous, spiky coronal flares.
“A cabal of Spanish conquistadors who sought the seven cities of gold from California to Patagonia made it with all the gold they found. Cursed by Aztec sorcery and burnt by the Church, in their bitter madness, they dedicated the crown to Cibola, a kingdom that never was.
“A crown must be ritually consecrated by blood and soil to bind the land and the people to the ruler’s bloodline. It was drowned in blood, but never has it touched earth. Outside, it’s only a curiosity, but because of its potential here, the play has outrun the Plot. Whoever lays claim to it becomes King of Hastur. They shall don it and declare a state of war and lay siege to Carcosa…. And bring the curtain down upon us all. If he is not stopped… Take it.”
I knew it would burn and mutilate my hand. It hurt to touch it, until I realized I was hurting me. My fear of it turned to raw, phantom agony, an almost magnetic repulsion.
“Now, I must play my role.” The slip of paper clutched in her hand bore a strangely unfinished, yet overripe symbol, a kind of three-headed question mark rendered in saffron ink upon ivory foolscap.
I took her hand. I had no idea of how it ended, but I would do anything to stop it.
I pulled her close and kissed her. Her lips trembled and she clung to me, but her passion dissolved into hysterical laughter. “He’s coming! If you don’t let me go and perform the scene, then we’ll all go into the void….”
“No, let’s go.” And we ran.
Somewhere, a pipe organ swung deliriously into Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, with the slap of whips on flesh for percussion.
I leapt into the nearest canvas flat, but instead of ripping through painted canvas, I pancaked against immovable stone.
The chamber at our backs was crowded with broken statuary, headless kings and armless nymphs, clothed in drifts of crematory dust. The flagstones were gray-veined yellow marble, pitted with tiny marine fossils and worn down with centuries of pacing. Fumbling along the wall in the dark, I clung to her arm. I nearly lost her when a long butcher knife slashed through the trompe l’oeil scenery on brittle canvas.
Cassilda cried out and ripped her hand free, so I followed her.
We raced down a flight of stairs and through a courtyard of leafless trees; a cavernous library of books that disintegrated in a whirlwind of debris at our passage; a feasting hall with a bowed table buried to the rafters with uneaten, rotten meals; and a ballroom where the blindfolded organist attacked the crescendo of the delirious, reeling tune in a spastic frenzy. And behind us, just as we escaped each monumental, empty chamber, the butcher knife pierced the canvas and shredded it and our hooded pursuer staggered into fleeting, panicky view.
Breathless, at last we broke through the tall glass doors of the ballroom to end up on a wide balcony overlooking a lake still as stone under two moons. Almost annihilated by the discordant shower of moonlight, on the far shore of the lake and yet somehow further away than the moons, I could see the spires of a city.
Cassilda threw off her robes and cast the Yellow Sign onto the water with a shiver of bravado. “Can you swim, my darling?”
I looked down, shaking my head. “It’s not even water….”
She looked at my hand. Only then noticing the crown cutting into my fingers, I threw it after the Yellow Sign.
The jellied ripples from our offerings passed like the quivers of sleeping meat. Deep within it, I could see sepulchral gray lights of unborn ghosts.
The now-familiar purr of steel ripping through fabric and cracking petrified wooden struts echoed through the ballroom. We had been lost, but now were found.
She climbed onto the railing, fingers dug into the eyeless mask of a caryatid. “Come, darling, if we are true, then we shall prevail and gain the far shore….”
She kissed me once and took my hand. “Quickly, before the sun rises beneath….” I climbed up onto the rail alongside her, looking down into the depths of Hali and seeing those imprisoned souls whose dull light bored up through the queasy sheen of doubled moonlight on the skin of the water like the moans of the damned from an orchestra pit.
I kissed her one last time, and pushed her.
She did not grab me, but fell gracefully into the water like a knife.
I watched her dissolve in the darksome gray deeps and heard the chemical scream of her undone body, her defiant soul, a pure peal of doomed beauty like an echo of the emptiness of Heaven. She would have to do it all over again, when next the curtain rose.
I jolted awake to find the trashbag slashed open around my neck, sodden with vomit. The man who’d been killing me only a minute ago now sat with his hands in his lap, looking out the window, pointedly oblivious to our other passengers.
A shrunken, careworn version of the man who’d dictated my suicide note sat across from me. He wore burgundy pajamas and a baggy cardigan with leather elbow patches, stretched out oddly by a bulletproof vest underneath. Resley’s copy of The King In Yellow lay on his trembling knees, open to the beginning of the last act. His bandaged left hand upon it looked like a swaddled chicken’s claw. His eyes were closed, his head bobbing in time with the whispers of the man who sat next to him, who had no face at all.
It wasn’t that I can’t recall it now, so much as that I simply could not perceive it, except as a colorless glass mask. He talked to Marble, whispering in his ear. Sheepishly, Marble nodded as if grooving on his own thoughts. The bodyguard on his other side looked right through me when I mouthed his name.
The limousine stopped and Carl got out to open the door. Marble shuffled out in corduroy slippers, out of the crosswalk and up the ramp to the Prado.
“It was you,” was all I could say, “in the… in the play….”
“We’ve never really been apart,” said the faceless man, “from the day you took what was mine.”
I stared at him, really tried to see him. He smiled. I looked away. For just a moment, he had a face, but it was mine.
“If you knew where I was and what I was doing,” I said, “then you could have stopped me…. Why didn’t you?”
“I could ask you the same question.” He turned and rapped on the partition, whispered briefly to Carl. “You could have brought me to the attention of the authorities. We kept each other’s secrets admirably. But now…”
I was unable to speak. Was there ever a time when I had not been someone’s puppet?
He pointed at Carl. The bodyguard slid across the suede acreage of seat to mix a drink.
“When you stole what was mine, I was beside myself, but then it occurred to me that I might learn more from making a gift of it. And how you have taught me.”
“I never used it the way you did.”
“I know! You attempted to redeem my Elixir! A dismal failure as an alchemist, but what a failure! The raw material, you refined away all the wrong properties. In my own experiments, I called them my angels, because they lacked free will, and were innocent of desire. Your first instinct was to use it to discover, to learn, to interrogate your angels, but you deluded yourself you set them free.
“Your choice of career was, of course, my suggestion. But you deserve the credit for the basic decency that gave me the idea to let you keep it, to let you… help people with it.”
Help people. Learn things. Lies within lies. He didn’t even have to erase my true motivation, I did it myself. I wanted what we all want, love and revenge. A cult orphan, nobody’s child in a generic post-acid hippie personality cult where children were assigned to adults as punishments. With a different broken, grudging parent every few months, you get to learn ulterior motives like the Eskimos know snow.
“Well, you’re too late,” I said. “It’s all gone. I couldn’t figure out how to make more.”
Now, I could see his smile, but without eyes, it wasn’t much comfort. “The Elixir’s potency comes from the ease with which it penetrates the brain, and that is the secret of its rarity. It only propagates in human cerebrospinal fluid and brain matter, and its progress is exquisitely slow. In my home country, we would keep ‘cows,’ angels too used up to give pleasure, and milk them, but only a few milligrams can be had every year, unless it is allowed to ripen. This takes—”
About four years, I thought, touching my forehead. The headaches weren’t withdrawal. The drug I had come to crave was already in my brain.
“It’s not working inside your head, of course; there’s a process to catalyze the psychoactive properties, but you’ve given me a sizable start on a plantation in this country.”
Fifty-two clients. Maybe the last few were just starting to have the headaches. Nobody had come to my door to complain yet—
“You know,” he said, finishing the drink, “the most remarkable thing about the process… is that, as the fungi gradually digests it, the cow experiences some diminished function, to be sure, but remains a dutiful farm animal long after the brain is little more than a stem.
“The Elixir is far more potent, however, from a patient who enjoys at least the illusion of free will. Your associate Carl has no forelobe to speak of at all, and yet…” He took his drink from Carl, who’d been waiting to deliver it. “How is the family, Carl?”
“Doing real good, thank you, sir!” Carl replied, smiling.
“So you see, the Elixir makes its own use of the brain, and yet the mind goes on, like a ghost in a haunted house. So long after you have grown weary of your own purpose in life, you may still serve.”
He held up a grotesquely long syringe. Carl took hold of my head and pressed it firmly against the opaque black window. “Hold still,” he said. I was unable to move it at all even as the needle slid into the soft tissue beside my tear duct, up behind my eyeball and into my skull.
It hurt like being sucked down a black hole, crushed and stretched into a monofilial string. I felt myself surging into the needle’s fat reservoir, leaving behind the hapless amateur brainwasher I’d been. I could see the straw-colored fluid dribbling into the syringe, but I was being drained out of myself.
When he let me go, I sagged onto a bus stop bench on Park Avenue, across from the zoo. People were running past me and police cars and fire engines surrounded the park. I lay there for a while until a bus came, and I got on and tried to get on with my life.
I spent two weeks in a motel, hiding out and listening. The news made much of Preston Marble’s death at the hands of his fanatical understudy. We all saw the video of the disheveled maniac emerging from the crowd to embrace the terrified, charismatic spiritual leader. The black rubber bulb in one hand looks enough like a grenade that two bodyguards move to pry them apart, but somehow, their actions are confused until both men are engulfed in a blanket of white fire.
The vest stuffed with thermite cremated both men on their feet and badly burned thirteen bystanders. The resulting mess was easily enough spun to hide Marble’s conspiracy, but the narcissistic nature of the murder-suicide turned him into another punchline, another hammily-plotted cautionary fable that only proved some people will believe anything.
I never saw Regina again, not even in my dreams of the French Play. I hope she reached the city on the far side of the lake. Nobody who’s been through what she endured should have to come back.
The alchemist was merciful. He told me that he would come to harvest from me only when he had to, and would leave no memory of it. So long as I cooperate, I can go about my business for as long as my brain function holds out. He would leave no memory of his visits, just as he would protect my old patients. He gave me a single dose of the Elixir and told me that if I had remorse about the way things had turned out, I could fix it.
I have recorded a new cover story, a new antibiography, and secured the necessary fake IDs to make it stick.
When I wake up, I will tell myself who I am. But I could not resist giving myself an escape hatch. Next to the tape recorder, Resley’s badly annotated copy of Le Roi En Jaune.
Whatever the newborn tenant of this motel room chooses, he will deny you the neat, poignant denouement you seek. He will burn this manuscript and go into the world and write his own ending.