The Celestial Instructi0n (7 page)

Along with the new account, Joex purchased an
entire new identity that looked like a dump of a credit reporting bureau
database entry with all the details. Joex now had a way of depositing money and
spending it without tracking physically back to him. He requested a Redbud debit
card. Sent to General Delivery in care of the name on the card, “Jim Rogers,”
he had it within a week.

Online, the social security number to the Death
Index came back for a Jim Rogers who had drowned the previous month in a
fishing accident near Alki Point in Washington State. That fact will take a while
to percolate through the credit agencies, Joex thought.

By this time, Joex had been staying the hostel for more
than two weeks without being any closer to unraveling the mystery of his
attack. In an about-face from his passive approach to life of late, Joex wanted
to take the initiative again somehow.

It almost certainly had to with the Crux. More
pressing, Joex needed some relatively permanent employment if he were to live
in Portland for any length of time. Of course, with the new anti-alien laws, it
was difficult to find permanent employment without a social security card or
even any kind of official government identification. The debit card was
something, but was too slender of a reed to count on.

But in a flash of spectacular realization analogous
to his questionable decision to take the initiative in counter-stalking Mr.
Brillo, Joex realized that there was one place who would gladly take a person
looking for minimal employment and both disregard government regulations on
employment with the infrastructure established to do so. “I am so fucking
crazy,” Joex thought. Suicidal or brilliant, either way he would draw this
puzzle to its conclusion.

So late in the third week after the attack on him
by Rahul Kavith, late of Sri Lanka and holy orders in Portland, Joex Baroco, gave
his netbook to the rainbow hair woman, who, despite convinced this was an old
creeper hitting on her, was happy to get a cute portable computer to Facebook.
He left the hostel, buried his most of Mr. Brillo’s remaining cash rolled in a short
piece of PVC pipe, stamped vertically into the soft muddy soil in the off-leash
section of the Mt. Tabor Park, and walked uptown to the headquarters of the International
Church of the Crux, in Portland, Oregon.

According to the information Joex cobbled together
from accounts on the Internet, the official account of the origin of the International
Church of the Crux assured the public that the Church was the fully-formed
conception of a renegade group of cognitive psychologists of the 1960’s.  Who
supposedly had imagined an intellectual school name “the crux,” after their
studies showed that cognitive ability discontinuously jumped by several
standard deviations when engaged in puzzles. Puzzles that systematically
engaged the different centers of thinking. According to the official account,
this exercising the structure of intellect brought the adherent closer to a
realization of God.

This story was nonsense of course given that the
Crux began as a secular mission in the 70’s, by the heretofore-described tech
millionaires, but the truth was not only deprecated, it was extinguished. So,
continuing with the official scriptural account, these 60’s psychologists, the
first seven Supernals, understood that their new regimen was so supremely effective
that simple qualitative accounts of the awakened ability were in a sense
derogatory to the entire process, and that the system of the Crux should be
referred as analogous to the transcendence of a devoutly-held religious belief.
Similarly, the Church did not use terms as “Intelligence” and “IQ” because they
thought those concepts limited the descriptive scope of these new alleged bounds-jumping
abilities.

According to the official account, the organization
of the Church into four Choirs of three Angelic Orders each. The precise
distinctions among the Orders and between the Orders and the body of lay
members who made up the Parich, or parichoners was well established before the
end of the 1960’s summers of lust had exhausted themselves in intellectual and
moral debauchery. The Supernal Order was reserved for prime movers of the Crux
who had moved, or perhaps were moved, past their corporeal existence. The next lower
order, the Celestials, had only one living member, Michael Voide, the First
Celestial of the First Choir.

Joyously—non-members might say suspiciously—every recorded
founding member of the Church of the Crux was now dead. The Church purchased,
copyrighted, patented, trademarked, and exclusively licensed their entire
bodies of research relating to aims of the Church. That research supposedly was
now actively undergoing analysis and restoration—a cynic might say fabrication—in
holy conservatories reporting directly to the Celestial, who reported all new
discoveries and principles, along with their price list.

And the single entity holding the principal
copyrights, trademarks, and patents after purchasing those rights from
founders’ families was not the Church in total, but the singular office of the First
Celestial Michael Voide.

Unofficially, the cynics whispered that the Church
of the Crux was a totalitarian extortion racket run and protected by
intelligent, sociopathic thugs. Whispering was necessary because unfortunate
grotesque accidents would predictably happen to the extended family members of
an effective identified detractor. A near drowning resulting in profound brain
damage, a blinding and castration by unknown attackers, irreparable comminution
of the pelvic girdle in an unfortunate hit-and-run, and horrifying attacks of
splattered Fluoroantimonic acid instantly carbonizing flesh and bone into a
distinctive speckled and excruciating disfigurement and permanent disability.

The detractor himself was never touched; they were
sued in every jurisdiction listing every claim that was colorable. Teams of
in-house Angel attorneys and prestigious outsiders lawyers promoted arguably non-frivolous
theories of every kind of damage and criminal allegation if it were important
to set legal precedent or enlist the power of the state to punish critics.

Dockets ran into the tens of thousands of pages of complaints,
amendments, motions, hearings, orders, emergency ex-parte applications,
appeals, oppositions, sanctions, rebuttals, special master investigations,
expert testimony, multiple and lengthy depositions, and private surveillance
And using pretext, bribery or theft, the Church obtained every fragment of
personal information the detractor possessed in order to frame every argument
and exploit every potential weakness. The ability of the defendant to pay
damages was irrelevant. If the litigation itself did not crush their material resources
and spirit, it estranged them from everyone around them who hated them for
exposing themselves to the Church’s fury. Following defeat and judgment, the
Church would depose tecum duces the defendant periodically, forever. Any
discrepancies or unease in forthcoming any information demanded by the Church
attorneys resulted in another round of criminal complaints of perjury,
emergency ex-parte motions to compel, to sanction, to hold in contempt of court
and potentially lead to indefinite imprisonment.

Beyond an aspect of the punishing arm, attorneys had
another purpose as well. The Church invariably used its attorneys to mediate
its manipulation of the world outside its velvet-draped clerestories; the
attorney-client privilege, used and misused, insulated the individual actors
within from the lawsuits without, giving plausible deniability between the
whispered atrocities of the Church enforcers and the Angels of the Choir. It
was quite a game with real people as disposable pieces.

The Church was not a pure fraud. As in most belief
and ideology in the world, the creed of the Church was both psychopathic
nonsense and effective praxis. The members of the Parich contracted to undertake
successive series of tests and puzzles under the private and secure supervision
of the Angelic orders. These tests and puzzles had the purpose and effect of
introducing novel concepts in problem representation and solution, evoking
every more precise distinction and apt metaphor. Beyond primitive notions of numerical
and verbal fluency, the puzzles and tests touched systematically on every
aspect of rhetoric and mathematics, logic and poetics, and at the rumored higher
levels, love and emotion.

But according to the Crux script, the darker levels
below the Angelic ascension asserted by the puzzle training: the Fallen and
even darker daemons must be exorcised as well.

Personal confessional interviews augmented with physiological
instrumentation were required. The Angelic master of training recorded every
particle of embarrassing detail in the supplicant’s life. Every infidelity,
every law broken—accidentally or not—in fact every error and failure and personal
embarrassment must be revealed and reviewed until every facet of the parichoner’s
impropriety was recorded in high-definition video correlated with a concurrent
physiological measure, and became the irrevocable and exclusive property of the
Church of the Crux.

Failure to follow any aspect of the Church’s
ecclesiastical authority resulted in graduated measures of punishment—penance—and
rehabilitation. Catching a parichoner in a lie while in training meant that the
cost of further training trebled and interviews doubled, as special
investigative Angels sought to reboot the salvation of perfection, as the
Church termed the process. Repeated offenses trebled the costs again; if the parichoner
would not or could not pay he or she was expelled and banned. They understood
that the provision that any slander, libel, or complaint would result in
immediate application of extraordinary and overwhelming force. What that
application might be was unspecified, but of course, the Church itself in the
exit interview referred to the more lurid disgusting rumors of the Church’s
critics.

As an alternative, if a parichoner could not afford
the services of test exaltation, he or she could become a member of the lowest
order of Angels and pay for training with service. Pay was something nebulous
in the Church, however, and rumors that work was a unbroken string of sixteen-hour
days with scant time for any training whatsoever. Of course, the Church had a
religious exception and did not provide for any retirement, disability, or
medical insurance, and it was assured that the moment you were no longer useful
to the Church that you would be dumped on the streets of the nearest urban center
with orders never to appear on Church property again.

Usually the reality was worse.

Once a member of the Order, tasks and schedules
were devised and enforced in a strictly hierarchical manner; the Archangels
directed the Angels, the Thrones were the absolute directors of the
Principalities, and the bulk of the professional work of the Church was done by
the Third Choir of Dominations, Virtues, and Powers. Within the Third Choir
were most of the church attorneys, test and puzzle researchers and developers,
persons handling the real estate and general intelligence monitoring of the
press, the grounds maintenance and estate keepers, and those devising price
lists and celebrity stunts and endorsements for benefit of the Church. While in
principal rising in the Orders was a matter strictly left to merit, fidelity
and faith, what was not well known in the Church (below the members of the
Second Choir) was that no one had ever risen above the Third Choir except by
personal designation by the First Celestial, Michael Voide.

Becoming a member of the Order was a life-changing
event. At the promise of perfection through free training and puzzle solving,
the Angel must obey every order without question or reservation. Even
insufficient enthusiasm was cause for immediate sanction.

Beyond the array of punishment and litigation that
a Fallen or daemon and his extended family might undergo, a questioned member
of the Order exposed himself to specific internal punishments. Following additional
intensive interviews replacing sleep periods was the first level of inquisition
that heralded the physical beatings—called penitential purification—by the four
elementals of water, electricity, sand, and air.  Then the segregation in the Church
rehabilitation camps held in guarded isolated compounds. The principal
selection criteria for siting these camps seemed to be places where—no matter
how desperately or agonizingly or terminally—no one other than Church Angels
could hear you scream.

Despite the distillate of horror rumored and
actually used on members by the Church, related by the most embittered
apostates, once again the truth was even worse.

“Wala nya ye! Bē gu na ma?” Sam’s cousin shouted as
he slapped Sam down to the stamped dirt floor, imperfectly covered with
irregular sheets of vinyl flooring. Sam’s cousin, the master of the compound
Sam was living at in southeast Freetown within easy view of the new U.S.
Embassy. Cousin Robert Siloi was a self-made gangster of the nascent building
industry in Freetown. In his early forties, short, round, and out-of-breath
from his effort, his face a cordillera of tribal scars, he specialized in
obtaining properties and organizing building trades for the NGO’s that swarmed
into Freetown to ply their good works at whatever cost in local corruption. However,
it seemed to Sam that his cousin’s principal business was to move building materials
around depending on a personal gauge of the minimum show he need to silence his
client’s frequent complaints.