Chapter One
Partly we did it out of pity. We felt sorry for people who didn’t
know what we knew. By reading their newspapers in our village
library and questioning the occasional lost hiker or adventurous
dirt-road motorist, we realized as never before that life out there
had become strident, disheartening and harsh while life back here,
back home in Bluff, Montana, remained harmonious and sweet. But we
also had selfish reasons for what we did. Over the years we’d come
to understand that there was something we needed from the outsiders,
without which our charmed little world might not survive. We needed
new blood. We needed wives and mothers. We needed a few brown eyes
among our offspring, more dark curly hair, and less inherited color
blindness. We needed to stir our lumpy hard old stock until it was
soft enough to pour again. And so, for the first time since we came
together one hundred and forty-seven-years earlier, and in violation
of our traditions of silence, modesty, and isolation, we gathered a
party to go down out of the hills and mount, at long last, a mission
to America.
The strange disturbed place needed help, and so did we.
Our wisdom for their vigor. We hoped to trade.
We were the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles and I am Mason Plato
LaVerle. I won’t start by recounting all of our history; it will
trickle out. We approved, that’s the main thing. We approved
abundantly. We approved of the Prince of Flocks, whom others call
Christ, and of our God of Gods, the-All-in-One, but we also approved
of a host of other divinities, majestic and humble, familiar and
obscure, from tricky Old Coyote, the Hopi spirit, to dainty Lady
Vegetalis, a garden sylph of cloudy origins. We approved of diverse
ideas and teachings as well, embracing the Golden Rule, Ten
Commandments, the Hindu law of Karma, and our very own Perpetuity of
Essence, which was easy to state but hard to comprehend. In the
words of the Seeress, our aging leader, who spoke every week for
three hours from her sunporch, propped in a wheelchair between two
folded sheepskins and waving a quartz-tipped cedar cane for
emphasis, Death does not end us, Birth does not begin us, and Life
does not corrupt us. We stream on forever through the Etheric Flux,
indestructible channels of vitality.
The doctrines we were best known for among outsiders-particularly
in our first two decades, when the newspaper writers from the great
cities still found our movement exotic and picturesque-related to
health and bodily well-being. Edenic Nutritional Science, as we
called it, was a system of eating and elimination that the
inscrutable All-in-One took from Earth in the days of Zoroaster and
finally restored in 1889 when the disembodied Discourser spoke to
the Crow tribe’s Little Red Elk, who corresponded with us through
coded letters smuggled from his people’s place of banishment near
southern Montana’s Bighorn River. Food, for Apostles, was more than
physical sustenance; it was emotion materialized, hardened spirit,
and its ingestion, absorption, and expulsion mirrored the deepest
patterns of the universe. ENS is a subject for later on, though.
First I should describe the situation that we found ourselves in a
couple of years ago.
We’d gone without publicity for so long that outsiders had forgotten
we existed. Then, the spring that I turned twenty-four, a handsome
young AFA rancher named Ennis Lauer came from behind in the final
round of Grit!, a nationally televised endurance contest, to beat
out a Kansas federal prison guard for the top prize of half a
million dollars. Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn as Lauer, in
the program’s closing challenge, lashed together a raft of willow
branches to float six hundred pounds of cinder blocks to the finish
line thirty miles away. The prison guard, who’d built a crude board
sled with a harness that tied around his chest, still hadn’t arrived
when Lauer received the trophy and uttered his memorable five-word
victory speech. “It wasn’t me, but gravity.”
Our leaders weren’t pleased when Lauer joined the contest, but all
was forgiven when he took the cup, becoming our movement’s first
celebrity since Francis Blair Howell, the presidential candidate who
won one percent of the vote in 1960 by backing a total tax exemption
for women. Lauer’s fame was a thrill, for our men and boys
especially, who’d grown up dominated by the Seeress and her
white-haired quartet of female counselors. Now we had a hero who
wore trousers. With his prize money, he erected a hillside mansion,
the largest private structure in all of Bluff. It cantilevered out
over downtown and cast a vast afternoon shadow over Venus Street
that some people grumped and grouched about at first, until the
Seeress taught them to regard it as a fortuitous giant public
sundial.
Lauer had a manner and a bearing that enchanted photographers-a
dreamy potency, detached yet fierce, forged by hard field work but
also by meditation-and this led to a steady round of articles in
newspapers from Portland to New Orleans. The Strongman Mystic of the
Rockies, a hybrid of Atlas and Nostradamus. He bolstered his fame by
publishing a calendar showing him in a corral among his stock with
rolled-up sleeves, a half-unbuttoned work shirt, and mineral-oil
perspiration on his chest (a stratagem that the Seeress reproached
him for in a lengthy sermon on Illusion). The calendar sold three
hundred thousand copies, helped by a story on a national news show,
and Lauer, still smarting from his public scolding, devoted the
funds to a spiritual effort he named the Apple.
The Initiative commenced in early June on the spacious third floor
of Lauer’s mansion, which he’d built in part as a community
conference room to supplement the decrepit Celestial Hall. Through
its tall picture windows I could see my town. It didn’t resemble
ordinary towns because it had almost no commercial district. Bluff’s
center had burned in 1965 when a fire surged down through a canyon
to our west and overwhelmed our volunteer fire department, which
refused all assistance from neighboring departments as well as the
hated U.S. Forest Service, whom we’d been fighting in court for
seven years for rights to the outflow of a thermal spring that
heated the greenhouses where we grew our herbs. Not much was lost,
though, just a hardware store, a welding garage, and a ladies
clothing shop. Bluff operated then, to some degree, on a modified
barter system called the Virtue Code, which assigned economic values
to good deeds as well as to more conventional products and services.
Cash was also honored for most transactions, but the co-op warehouse
that stocked our food and sundries ran exclusively on Virtue
Coupons. They were larger than dollars, lavender not green, and the
picture inside the central oval seal was of a mourning dove sunning
on a branch. Every couple of years a tax agent from Helena would
storm through Bluff with armed guards and a black car and confiscate
a portion of our currency, but it took only days for our printers to
replace it, refining its design each time they did and adding more
lines of texture to the dove’s feathers.
Attendance at the Initiative’s first seminar was by invitation only.
My father, a Mineral County deputy sheriff who only arrested people
when he felt threatened by them, and my mother, who assisted the
Seeress with various clerical and domestic chores, cautioned me when
I was summoned that Lauer’s views had yet to be sanctioned by the
leadership and therefore couldn’t be discussed in public. Still,
they said it was crucial that I go.
“Mr. Lauer will make you privy to certain hard truths that perhaps
you’d prefer not to know,” my mother said, “but which wise AFAs must
no longer turn away from.” Unlike my father, my mother took pleasure
in speech and stressed the seams and spaces between words. “Whatever
he may require you to do, though, be confident you have our
blessing. If we lose you, we lose you. ‘What should be, is.'”
“Lose me how?” I asked.
My father seemed pained and got up and left the kitchen, not always
the strongest of men when feelings threatened. The gun he carried
for work had never looked right on him. It would have looked more
appropriate on my mother.
“Lose you to their fine phantasms,” she said.
The conference room held five men besides myself, none of them over
thirty and all unmarried. Lauer, who’d gotten his hands on a
projector during one of the paid outside appearances where he
performed feats of strength for business audiences and touted his
notion of Etheric Stamina, conducted a forty-minute presentation on
our movements prospects in the next decades. He explained that
unless we introduced new bloodlines into our active breeding pool,
Bluff faced a so-called “biological sunset” that would enfeeble us
in the near future and was, in fact, already causing harm. A hush
settled over the room. We coughed and fidgeged. We knew all too
vividly what Lauer meant. There were children in town who didn’t
seem quite right, who still couldn’t read at nine and ten years old
and who sat out the sports and games we’d played at their age
because of sore joints and other vague complaints. The young man
sitting next to me, Elias Stark, had a little nephew of twelve, I’d
heard, who’d spent several months at a costly Seattle clinic
learning to synchronize, for the first time, the movements of his
left hand and his right eye.
“I’m going to speak sharply and plainly,” Lauer said. “Someday our
descendants will all be idiots. And there won’t be enough of them,
in any case. Our young ladies just aren’t producing like they used
to, and they were never prolific to begin with. In a way that’s a
tribute to their development. It means they enjoy the freedom to say
‘no.’ But there are limits, and soon we’ll reach those limits.”
Lauer left it there. We broke for lunch. We grazed on a buffet of
local staples: thin-sliced antelope sausage on sprouted black rye,
smoked rainbow trout preserved in cider vinegar, squash relish,
chopped barley salad, and clover tea. No salt on anything, but
quantities of pepper, cold-stone ground to protect its volatile
oils. Pepper aroused the intestines, it sped their labors. Disease
begins in the gut, the duodenum, and death is a matter of sluggish
peristalsis-that’s the great key to Edenic Nutritional Science. Our
bowels should work ceaselessly, not just at intervals.
Lauer took me aside after the meal and led me into an office off the
conference room decorated with framed photographs that showed him
shaking hands with famous men, including Montana’s Democratic
senator and a champion Negro golfer with dyed red hair. Lauer was a
new and intimidating type for me, clothed and turned out in a way
I’d never encountered. His shoes were a cross between tennis shoes
and dress shoes, fastened by Velcro straps instead of laces; his
watch had a small inner dial that showed the moon phase; and he wore
cologne in a town where scents were frowned upon because of their
effect on certain glands involved in the metabolism of starch. It
wasn’t a light scent, either-all musk and smoke. It set off a drip
of thick mucus behind my tonsils.
“I’ve been authorized by a select committee,” he said, “to recruit
volunteers for an historic undertaking meant to address the concerns
we’ve just discussed. I asked around some. Your name kept coming up.
I hear you speak well.”
“Thank you.”
“Is it true?”
“I guess.”
“Not very promising: ‘I guess.’ Impress me, Mason. Turn a fancy
phrase.”
“Just out of the blue, that’s hard to do,” I said.
“I know it is. It’s impossible. I’m teasing. Get used to being
teased by me.”
I nodded.
“I’m playful because I’m passionate,” he said.
Lauer knew mind tricks, I learned that afternoon, and once he
finished describing the mission itself, which he did without much
color or expression-nine months on the road, three teams of two men
each, and weekly reports to be filed with his office-he switched to
the subject of Neuro-Dynamic Salesmanship, which was the topic he
really seemed to care about. He told me he’d learned it from a
Phoenix businessman who’d earned almost eight million dollars in one
year selling therapeutic car-seat covers impregnated with ionized
powdered copper. He was already using its principles on me, he said.
“Right now,” he revealed, “you’re in a waking trance. You’ll notice
that your breathing matches mine and I’m guiding your eye movements
in specific patterns. I’ve made a request that you haven’t yet
agreed to, but the truth is, right now, you’re powerless to resist
me. Do you see how your feet are pointing?”
I looked down. My feet didn’t seem to be pointing anywhere special.
“That particular posture is always a ‘yes.’ Don’t worry, you’ll
learn to spot it for yourself someday. But say the word anyway.”
“Yes?”
“Good man,” said Lauer. “You need to know that I’m funding this
effort privately, which gives me a personal stake in the results.
Money is going to be tight, no way around it, but if you budget
wisely, and you sacrifice, you ought to do well. If you don’t, we
might be finished here. We’re down to less than nine hundred active
members. And that’s the Church’s figure. I think it’s half that.”
I’d never counted us. I had no idea.
“I suspect it’s not much more than four. Which I find tragic.”
After allowing this figure to sink in some, Lauer reached through
the space between us and touched my knee. “Our big worry, of course,
is that you won’t come back once you’ve had a long sweet drink of
freedom. So think about it. Think realistically. Not that what they
offer out there is freedom.”
“What is it that they offer?” I said.
“Death.”
I asked him if he was referring to their guns.
“Their guns are the least of their problems,” Lauer said. “Look at
what they dump into their gullets. They eat death. They defecate
death. It’s all they know. And when they sleep, they dream of death.
You’ll see it. You’ll see how it saturates their souls. Just walk
into one of their toy stores and count the death dolls.”
I tried to imagine what such things looked like. “Skeleton figures?”
I asked.
“They might as well be. Emaciated elongated young women with barely
enough flesh to cover their skulls but with breasts the size of a
nursing mother of twins. The Sphynx and the Griffin are more
convincing creatures.”
He allowed me to sit with these images for a moment before asking
me, eye to eye, with an expression that I sensed he’d borrowed from
the Phoenix millionaire, if I’d be comfortable doing whatever was
necessary to meet potential mates during my mission and persuade one
of them to accompany me back home. I wasn’t exactly certain what he
meant, but I felt I understood his general point: Would I devote my
whole body to the task? And, further, was there someone here in
Bluff, someone whom I was pledged to or had feelings for, who might
prevent me from me going forth wholeheartedly?
(Continues…)
Doubleday
Copyright © 2005
Walter Kirn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-50764-X
Excerpted from Mission to America
by Walter Kirn
Copyright © 2005 by Walter Kirn.
Excerpted by permission.
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