Evenson's detective witnesses and takes part in all kinds of the childish mumbo-jumbo new faiths and other fraternal organizations employ to set themselves apart, inspire loyalty, and guarantee security for the faithful brotherhood. In varying degree, fraternal organizations from Skull & Bones to the Raccoon Lodge ritualize the appearance and observances of their membership. Some groups have actual uniforms, others content themselves with shared choices that add up to an ad hoc uniform. Have you seen Scientologists on the march in their Florida redoubt, members of the New York Athletic Club marching into their mansion on Central Park South, or Shriners whooping it up in a convention hotel? They don't really dress like other people, they dress like themselves. Ramse and Gous make Kline put on gray trousers, a white shirt, and (a brilliant detail) a red clip-on tie. That's what they all wear, the uniform of the anonymous white American drudge. Kline takes this fact in for a moment, then forgets it. So does the reader. The point of the uniform is that it is instantly forgotten.
Before the detective can be introduced to Borchert, certain ritual satisfactions must be accomplished at the gate. It is the guard's duty to enquire, "What is wanted?" and the applicant's duty to respond with the self-congratulatory formula, "Having been faithful in all things, we come to see he who is even more faithful than we." This rubbish sounds at least faintly parodic, but it is utterly surpassed by the formulaic rigmarole that goes on in the fortress of the Pauls, where the individuation of given names is erased and every remark of a person of higher status must be examined to determine if it is an orphic or parabolic bit of higher learning, a "teaching."
"What's your name?" Kline asked.
"I'm Paul," said the man.
"You're not," said Kline.
"We all are," he said.
Kline shook his head. "You can't all be Paul," he said.
"Why not?" said the man. "Is this a teaching?"
"A teaching?" Kline said. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Should I write it down?"
"Write what down?"
"'You can't all be Paul.' And whatever else comes thereafter from your lips."
"No," said Kline, a strange dread starting to grow in him. "I don't want you to write anything down."
"Is that too a teaching?" said Paul. "'Write nothing down'?"
A strange dread is right-the Pauls have decided he is the Messiah, and they intend to give him the honor of a crucifixion. The other side is just as horrifying, the only difference in their plans for Kline being that they wish to crucify him as Barabbas, not Jesus. In two regards he does seem perhaps to be singled out by a larger force: Kline could be seen as harrowing an all-but literal hell as he goes about his murderous business, and no matter how great the odds against him, it comes to seem that he cannot be killed. So as he sinks deeper and deeper into a river of blood, in the process completely aware that he is losing, then has lost, his soul, Kline may either actually have become a holy figure, the new Messiah who brings not life but the gruesome Last Days and End Times, or he may be completely deluded, off his rocker, a nut case whack job. Evenson, thankfully, lets the ambiguity stand.
Instead of resolving Kline's worldly status, he does something far more interesting. Reeking (one imagines) of smoke, covered in blood, Kline listens to the sound of the approaching sirens and, having nothing else to do, walks off. Soon he begins to jog, then settles into straightforward running, asking himself Where now? and What next? The last protagonist of a great work of American fiction to ask himself these questions so resonantly was probably Huckleberry Finn.
In the afterword written for the 2002 University of Nebraska Press republication of Altmann's Tongue, Evenson describes what befell him when the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, the institution in which he was raised to be a faithful and believing Mormon, decided to pose itself against his work, which it saw to be indulgent toward violence and depraved in its outlook. (It seems that none of this was made very explicit. The Church retreated into a prolix bureaucratic boondoggle intended to wear him down and ended by requesting that he prove his good faith by ceasing to write. The man was mugged by his own religion.) It is difficult not to frame the sects in Last Days as bleakly parodic versions of Mormonism, but to do so would be more than a little reductive. Sure, Mormonism is in there, but so is a great deal else.
Early on in his afterword, Evenson speaks of a period when he was living in Seattle, studying and writing. He had agreed to serve as a bishopric counselor and was sometimes asked to perform the tasks of a transient bishop. In this role, he picked up stranded, homeless, sometimes derelict people at certain specified locations and simply drove them around the city, hearing them out and trying to figure out how best to help them. Listening to what they had to say was central to his mission as he defined it. At least once, he felt that the man beside him represented serious danger.
The conclusion to his afterward pushes this situation up several notches:
"You have been driving in the car, a man pointing a gun at your head, and now he has left the car and you are free. Everything around you has gone strange. You are no longer in the same world you were in before the gun bruised your temple. You have the suspicion that you are no longer yourself.
"Now, now that you are free (if it really is you), the question is, How do you make sense of the rest of your life?"
What are you doing, where are you going, who are you? After great extremity, everything in your life should be seen anew. The objects are pretty much the same, except of course that they contain within them the seeds of what happened to you, but the maps around and to them have all been redrawn. You can get lost in a second. Who you are is a puzzle it may take the rest of your life to solve, and in the end it may turn out that you are merely the person who spent his life trying to work out the puzzle of who he was. But that. . that's not nothing.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF MUTILATION
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast if from thee. . And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee. .
I
It was only later that he realized the reason they had called him, but by then it was too late for the information to do him any good. At the time, all the two men had told him on the telephone was that they'd seen his picture in the paper, read about his infiltration and so-called heroism and how, even when faced with the man with the cleaver-or the "gentleman with the cleaver" as they chose to call him-he hadn't flinched, hadn't given a thing away. Was it true, they wanted to know, that he hadn't flinched? That he had simply watched the man raise the cleaver and bring it down, his hand suddenly becoming a separate, moribund creature?