Chapter Two was about the difficulty of believing in things — not just in religion, but in advertising, in sex, in your own daily life. Van Dyke argued that even when we know that companies aren’t telling the complete truth about their products, we should buy them anyhow (as long as they aren’t actually harmful) because the country and the economy would collapse if we didn’t. “By the same token,” Van Dyke wrote, “lies about God, such as we find in Holy Scripture, help us keep our psychic economy running. If we can believe, for instance, that the world was all knocked together in six days rather than in however many billions of years, we’ve come a long way toward self-mastery.” The rest of the chapter was a kind of advertisement for God and all the things He would do for you once you “bought” him, such as keeping you from ever being depressed or bitter or coming down with colds.
Chapter Three was titled “Wash Your Own Brain” and was about techniques you could use in order to start beleving in God. Most of the techniques were based on methods of acting. Van Dyke explained that long ago religious-type people had been against plays and actors because by watching them people learned to think of all their feelings and ideas as arbitrary and interchangeable. An actor’s identity was nothing more than a hat he put on or took off at will, and what was true for actors was true for us all. The world was a stage.
“What our Puritan forebears failed to recognize,” Van Dyke wrote, “is the evangelical application of these insights. For if the way we become the kind of people we are is by pretending, then the way to become good, devout, and faithful Christians (which, admit it, is a well-nigh impossible undertaking) is to pretend to be good, devout, and faithful. Study the role and rehearse it energetically. You must seem to love your neighbor no matter how much you hate his guts. You must seem to accept sufferings, even if you’re drafting your suicide note. You must say that you know that your Redeemer liveth, even though you know no such thing. Eventually, saying makes it so.”
He went on to relate the story of one of his parishioners, the actor Jackson Florentine (the same Jackson Florentine who’d co-starred in Gold-Diggers of 1984!), who had been unable to believe in Jesus with a fervent and heartfelt belief until Reverend Van Dyke had made him pretend to believe in the Easter Bunny, a major idol in Florentine’s childhood pantheon. The doubting actor prayed before holographic picture of the Easter Bunny, wrote long confessional letters to him, and meditated on the various mysteries of his existence or nonexistence, as the case might be, until at last on Easter morning he found no less than one-hundred-forty-four brightly dyed Easter eggs hidden all over the grounds of his East Hampton estate. Having revived this “splinter of the Godhead,” as Van Dyke termed it, it was a simple matter to take the next step and be washed in the blood of the Lamb and dried with its soft white fleece.
Before Daniel got to Chapter Four — “A Salute to Hypocrisy” — the book was missing from his mattress. For a moment, finding it gone, he felt berserk with loss. Wave after wave of desolation swept through him and kept him from sleep. Why should it mean so much? Why should it mean anything? It was a ridiculous book that he’d never have bothered with if there had been anything else on hand.
But the feeling couldn’t be argued away. He wanted it back. He ached to be reading it again, to be outraged by its dumb ideas. It was as though part of his brain had been stolen.
Over and above this simple hurt and hunger was the frustration of having no one to complain to. The theft of a book was a trifling injustice in a world where justice did not obtain and no one expected it to.
Late in September the word came through, in a letter from his lawyer in Amesville, that his sentence was not to be reduced or suspended. It didn’t come as a surprise. He’d tried to believe he’d be paroled but never really believed he’d believed it. He didn’t believe anything. It amazed him how cynical he’d become in just a couple months.
Even so there were times when he felt such a passionate self-pity he had to go off by himself and cry, and other times worse than that when a depression would settle over him so black and absolute that there was no way to fight against it or argue his way out of it. It was like a physical disease.
He would tell himself, though not out loud, that he refused to be broken, that it was just a matter of holding out one day at a time. But this was whistling in the dark. He knew if they wanted to break him they would. In fact, they probably weren’t going to bother. It was enough that he should be made to appreciate that their power, so far as it affected him, was limitless.
Until March 14.
What he hadn’t been prepared for was the effect this news had on the attitude of the other prisoners. All through the summer Daniel had felt himself ignored, avoided, belittled. Even the friendliest of his fellow prisoners seemed to take the attitude that this was his summer vacation, while the unfriendliest were openly mocking. Once he’d had to fight to establish his territorial rights in the dorm, and thereafter no one had overstepped the bounds of a permitted formal sarcasm. But now, surely, the fact (so clear to Daniel) that he was as much a victim as they were should have begun to be clear to them too. But it wasn’t. There were no more jokes about summer camp, since summer was definitely over, but otherwise he remained an outsider, tolerated at the edge of other people’s conversations but not welcomed into them.
This is not to say that he was lonely. There were many other outsiders at Spirit Lake — native Iowans who’d been sent up for embezzlement or rape and who still considered themselves to be uniquely and privately guilty (or not guilty, for what difference that made) rather than members of a community. They still believed in the possibility of good and evil, right and wrong, whereas the general run of prisoners seemed genuinely impatient with such ideas. Besides the Iowa contingent there was another large group of prisoners who were outsiders — the ones who were crazy. There were perhaps twenty concerning whom there was no question. They weren’t resented the way Iowans were, but they were avoided, not just because they were liable to fly off the handle but because craziness was thought to be catching.
Daniel’s friend Bob Lundgren was both an Iowan and crazy, in a mildly dangerous but amiable way. Bob, who was twenty-three and the youngest son of and undergod farmer in Dickson County, was serving a year for drunk driving, though that was only a pretext. In fact he’d tried to kill his older brother, but a jury had found him not guilty, since there’d been no one’s word for it but the brother’s, who was an unpleasant, untrustworthy individual. Bob told Daniel that he had indeed tried to kill his brother and that as soon as he was out of Spirit Lake he was going to finish the job. It was hard not to believe him. When he talked about his family his face lighted up with a kind of berserk poetic hatred, a look that Daniel, who never felt such passionate angers, would watch entranced as if it were a log burning in a fireplace.
Bob wasn’t a big talker. Mostly they just played slow, thinking games of chess when they got together. Strategically, Bob was always way ahead. There was never any chance of Daniel’s winning, any more than he could have won against Bob at arm-wrestling, but there was a kind of honor in losing by a slow attrition rather then being wiped out by a completely unexpected coup. After a while there got to be a strange satisfaction that had nothing to do with winning or losing, a fascination with the patterns of play that developed on the board, patterns like the loops of magnetic force that iron filings will form on a sheet of paper, only much more complicated. Such a blessed self-forgetfulness came over them then, as if, as they sat there contemplating the microcosm of the chessboard, they were escaping from Spirit Lake; as if the complex spaces of the board were truly another world, created by thought but as real as electrons. Even so, it would have been nice to win just one game. Or to play to a draw, at least.