I did not wish to cause my wife distress. I decided that I would not trouble my family further, and if this meant that I would allow dark-complected persons to land an aircraft on our island, from which they would then lift off and air-drop an incendiary device over the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, so that wind-borne pathogens such as the Ebola virus were then widely dispersed, killing tens of thousands in, for example, nearby East Hampton, who was I to interfere? Helen helped me from the car because I was not walking well. It is not unreasonable to suppose that I had fallen victim to Plum Island’s most celebrated export, and my joints were swelling, and my dendrites were occluded, and my ability to express myself was fading away into the autumnal night.
The meeting at the Unitarian Universalist church featured three persons. Myself; a one-armed man, none other than the caretaker for the Hilliards; and a history teacher from the local school, who advertised right at the outset that she had no interest in talking about any higher power. And she didn’t care, she said, if the meetings recommended that she believe in such a higher power. This higher power, she opined, was a tinkerer and malingerer who had no purpose but to figure out who were the haves and who were the have-nots and to make sure that the have-nots suffered for the rest of their lives. The only way to improve in this program, she said, was to pull yourself up by your damned bootstraps. By way of example, she pointed at the one-armed man. The implication seemed to be that it was time for him to stop feeling sorry for himself because he had only the one arm. It was time for him to experience a little gratitude that he had any arms at all! There were people out there, she told this one-armed man, who had to eat with their feet. Have you begun practicing with your feet? she asked the one-armed man, because you should have a plan in place, in case something happens to your other arm. What if you lose that arm too, and you have to eat with your feet, and you have to breathe into some computer contraption to make words on a computer screen appear, and then you would be grateful, I bet, that you used to be a one-armed man. You should be grateful, she said to the one-armed man, who as yet had not made even one retort. I mean, look at him, she said, and here she began gesturing at me. Anyone around here could tell you, she said, he used to be someone. Ask around. He used to work for the federal government, somewhere in the government, but look at him now, and who’s to blame for what he did, there’s no one to blame but him, and now he can barely walk, and he can barely put a sentence together, so it’s a good thing that he has a lot of money, because if he didn’t have people to look after him, he’d just be in assisted living somewhere, complaining that his retarded son doesn’t visit enough. Understand what I’m saying to you? I’m saying to you that you have to be grateful. Look at me. Do you think I waste time worrying about the things I don’t have? Do you think I waste time thinking I could have done more with my teaching than teach a bunch of kids on an island where they don’t even give a rat’s ass for anything they’re getting in school? Do you think I waste time thinking about that? No! I’ll tell you what I do! I count my blessings! I count my blessings that I’m not like him! All those men I could have ended up with, I’m glad I’m through with them! I’m glad I’m done with all of it!
After she completed this elucidation of the self-help program that had brought us together here, she asked if anyone else had a “burning desire” to speak. The one-armed man and I looked guiltily at each other. Perhaps both of us would have had plenty to say, but now it seemed that a response would only prolong the misery. We sat in an uncomfortable silence for a good three or four minutes. The schoolteacher riffled through sheets of program-approved literature, as if this were going to ensure our continued submission, and then she said, “Why don’t we all say the serenity prayer?”
Since the meeting ended thirty-eight minutes early, I had a good long time to sit on an old mossy bench in front of the Unitarian Universalist church. The one-armed man kept me company for a while, and what he told me, when he had a chance to speak without fear of retribution, was that he was thinking of leaving the island. The same people, the same roads, the same two ways of getting to town, the same enmities, the same movement to the seasons, the same waves breaking over the same rocks, the same unforgiving winter. He didn’t see what there was in it for him. He didn’t mind pruning rosebushes, and the little cottage that the Hilliards had built for him was charming enough, and that architect who designed it sure was a friendly guy, but—
7. Modernism and Its Links to Contemporary Terror
The architect! He was the link! That was it! I could scarcely wait for the one-armed man, with his shirtsleeve flapping like a semaphore, to go on his disconsolate way up the block. Why hadn’t I thought about it before? While waiting for my wife to return, I was on pins and needles! The missing causal agent, the conspirator sine qua non, the person who almost certainly passed secrets, and who knew what else, to the dark-complected hostiles, was now revealed to me. I experience these revelations, you see, as nearly catastrophic in their gravity. My ability to reason as methodically as I do must be considered a blessing from above, perhaps from the higher power. Though the schoolteacher at the meeting might argue that a higher power had no place in her newfound life as a motivational speaker, I could but conclude that there was indeed intelligent design, benevolent intelligent design, especially in the matter of conspiracy detection.
Fact: Who was the leading architect on the island? I couldn’t remember his name, and the more I thought about it, the more this blockage seemed evidence of the fact that I was being drugged by a person or persons who were anxious to keep me from learning the truth about the Omega Force. And yet even without his legal name, it was clear that the leading architect on the island, by virtue of the number of structures lately built, plans submitted to the zoning board, was the modernist architect I have already discussed. His buildings, it goes without saying, were monstrosities that looked more like the gun emplacements and bunkers of the dilapidated military structure on our island than they looked like proper houses. There were always show-offy adornments like round windows, carved wooden eggs hanging from the eaves, newel posts shaped like lighthouses.
Fact: Who, by virtue of his drafting and planning, had best access to the necessary topographical maps and surveys of the island? Certainly, here again, the conclusion is obvious. The modernist architect was the belle of the ball, invited to every party, every luncheon, where he was inevitably cooed over by the women of the island. This despite the fact that there were serious character flaws to the modernist architect. For example, no muscle tone. The modernist architect did not take regular exercise in any of the popular ways. I had never seen him playing tennis. I had never seen him playing golf. I had never seen him during the adult swim hour at the country club pool. I had never even seen him taking a walk. The modernist architect had no wife. And this was perhaps the most damning thing that could be said about him. A wife is the very foundation of a successful moral life. Of course, I have no objection to alternate lifestyles, and I knew a number of highly effective persons during my days in the Nixon and Ford presidential administrations who may or may not have dabbled in alternate lifestyles. They were fine men who went on to excel in the public sector. But there was no place for alternate lifestyles on the island, which exists primarily as a site for the socialization of the young.