Thomas M. Disch (10 page)

Afterward Peter figured that that evening’s heresies were a by-product of their lifelong contest as twins. Patrick couldn’t stand to be outshone by his brother, even in a contest to see which of them could be the more complete cynic. Later, Patrick had probably regretted some of his opinions— regretted, at least, the fact that he’d expressed them.

Peter studied his menu with growing discouragement: veal parmesan, chicken cacciatore, spaghetti with Italian sausage, spaghetti with meatballs, spaghetti with Italian tomato sauce. Imagination and novelty were not top priorities at The Blue Grotto. Rather, to judge by the size of the portions he’d seen being delivered to other tables, the place prided itself on offering an optimum pig-out for the dollar.

Fat people had to expect to be treated like fat people. Lots of fruitcakes at Christmas, and invitations to smorgasbord-type restaurants.

Usually, Peter didn’t let it get to him, but when it came from a brother who was his identical twin, and who had managed to keep reasonably trim despite the same genetic inheritance, it was hard to maintain his usual pose as the jolly fatso. They say that inside every fat man there’s a thin man crying to get out; in this case, Peter could see, sitting across the dining table from him, what that thin man looked like.

The waitress came and Patrick ordered first: spaghotti and meatballs.

Was he mortifying his flesh? Peter wondered. The waitress turned to Peter, and he said, “I’ll have the same.” She asked them if they wanted garlic bread, and his brother nodded yes. She offered a choice of dressings for their salads, French, blue cheese, ranch, and spicy Italian. Patrick said, “Blue cheese,”

and Peter said, “The same.”

“I saw you on TV,” Peter remarked when the waitress had left the table.

Patrick grimaced. “That seems to have become part of the job description.”

“The next day three different people at work mentioned it. They know you’re my brother.”

“Did I get good reviews?”

“You got good marks for style. Content’s another matter. You’d need more than a ten-second sound bite to convince any of the women at our office that abortion should be made illegal.”

“Well, that isn’t the purpose of the protests.”

“What is, if you don’t mind my asking? It’s been two years now, and you haven’t closed down the clinic, so that can’t be your purpose either. Why keep beating a dead horse?”

“Martyrdom. There’s nothing like martyrdom for bringing people together.

It’s an exalted feeling to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake. As Christ remarks, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It’s how the Church came into being originally. Without Rome’s inspired persecution, Christianity would have been just another cult from the East. But Rome fed
us
to the lions, and made saints of us. People want to be saints, if it can be done without dieting.”

Peter at once retaliated with his own pointed observation. “It’s a nice theory, but I don’t notice that you ever put yourself in jeopardy of arrest.

You
don’t lie down in front of the police cars.
You
don’t handcuff yourself to the clinic’s front door. Is martyrdom a privilege reserved for the laity these days?”

“The Bishop hasn’t required such a sacrifice of me yet.”

“And you just follow orders?”

“That’s how hierarchy works. To do him credit, I expect the Bishop would see to it that he got arrested before any of us. There is a certain amount of prearrangement in these manners. The police don’t like surprises, and neither does the Bishop. So he may opt to be arrested at some point, and not just because he has a taste for the limelight. Though of course it’s all theater.

We want to dramatize our moral position, which is that abortion is tantamount to murder. I shouldn’t say ‘tantamount’: It
is
murder. If indigent parents could take their children under age sixteen to a clinic to have them put to sleep like unwanted pets, most people would allow that that was morally objectionable. Would it seem fanatical to try to save those children by acts of civil disobedience?”

“Yes, I remember—that was your sound bite. And it’s a good one. In fact, when you put it that way, the Church’s actions don’t seem sufficiently drastic.”

“Peter, you take the words out of my mouth. And just in time. Here come our salads.”

The salads came in large bowls of simulated teak and were just such salads—iceberg lettuce, tomato wedges, slices of cucumber and radish—as most of the customers would have made for themselves at home. The only difference was that the waitress offered to grind some pepper over them.

“How are things at
your
job?” asked Patrick, who tried to allow his brother equal time conversationally.

“The same as ever,” Peter grumped. He didn’t much like his job as the head of the amortization division of North Central Insurance and much preferred, with his brother, to talk about Church matters, even though he was no longer a Catholic. He was, instead, a fervent exCatholic of the sort that keeps tabs on every scandal concerning the Church and has to comment on all of them. “It’s a dull job, you wouldn’t want to hear about it.”

“Most people say that about their jobs when they’re away from them. Then at their offices they become obsessed.”

“You want to know what we’ve been obsessing about at my office this week? Tetris.”

“What’s Tetris?” Patrick asked politely, with a tomato wedge poised before his lips.

“A computer game we all play when we think no one is looking. I used to be the office champion. I was getting scores over twenty-two thousand. But now there’s this secretary in personnel who is a pinball wizard. Twenty-five thousand is nothing to her. I swear she has a fivenanosecond reaction time.

It’s not like I’m even competition for her. And that’s the news from North Central. All of it.” Before Patrick could change the subject again, Peter went on, “You were saying about the abortion thing—how I took the words out of your mouth.”

“Mm.” Patrick pantomimed that his mouth was full. “Yes, when you said the Church isn’t zealous enough. The Bishop agrees. So, we intend to initiate a more aggressive program of intervention. However, that’s something I’m not free to talk about until the formal announcement has been made.”

“What a tease you are, Patrick.”

“You’ll twist my arm? Okay, I’ll tell you. We are going to open up a facility for reluctant teenage mothers whose parents can be persuaded to commit them to our care. We’ve had the lawyers going over the details for a couple years, and with the changes that have just been made in the state laws requiring parental consent for girls under eighteen, we think it’ll pass muster in the courts. There have been similar ‘tough love’ detention centers for teenage drug abusers, but it’s never been applied to the abortion situation.”

“You mean to say, you’re going to put pregnant teenage girls in prison and force them to come to term?”

“You’ve got to admit that’s a more effective way to save fetuses than chanting outside abortion clinics.”

“Jesus. That could be a major felony. Not to mention what you could be sued for.”

“That’s why it will have to be undertaken, initially, by lay groups without the official sanction of the Church.”

“More martyrs?”

“We have enough volunteers to fill one or two federal prisons, if it comes to that.”

“And will you be building prisons of your own for the lucky mothers-to-be?”

“The Church already has a lot of underutilized real estate.”

“Empty convents, that sort of thing?”

“There would be an irony in that, wouldn’t there? In terms of the old anti-Catholic canard of convents being filled with the graves of the nuns’

illegitimate offspring. Now those imaginary bones can actually be given life.

Poetically speaking. But in fact, the first site that’s been selected is my old stomping grounds at Etoile du Nord.”

“The seminary you went to.”

“It hasn’t been a seminary for quite a while now. Vocations have fallen off, as you may have heard, and Etoile du Nord has never been considered top of the line. It’s my alma mater and all that, but even so. I think my most vivid memories of Etoile du Nord is the mosquitoes. I can still remember how they…”

A strange expression came over Patrick’s face, and he lifted his hand and pressed his outspread fingers against the breast pocket of his madras shirt. He closed his eyes and took a sharp breath.

Peter thought his brother must have something caught in his throat and feared he would have to attempt the Heimlich maneuver. He prayed a quick prayer to the god of desperate atheists, and his prayer was answered at once, for Patrick took another, easier breath and opened his eyes.

“Are you all right?”

Patrick replied with a weak smile. “All better. It was just… nothing at all.”

“You know, Patrick, between the two of us there’s no need to be secretive. I mean, I’ve got a vested interest in your good health and vice versa. If you’ve got some kind of heart condition, I should know about it—for my own good.”

“Honestly, Petey, it’s nothing like that. It’s the skin on my chest.

It’s, urn, sore.” When Peter continued to give him a questioning look, he elaborated. “I spilled a hot cup of coffee on myself this morning. The skin developed some kind of blister, and sometimes my clothing rubs against it the wrong way and it’s painful. Usually I’m not even aware of it. Okay? Now, about what I was talking about before, I really shouldn’t be saying anything more about it. My tongue got carried away. But there is another matter that I wanted to pick your brain about. If I may?”

“You can pick what’s there.”

“It’s about that cult that was having trouble with the tax authorities—the Receptionists? Some name like that?”

“The Receptivists. What about them?”

“I was wondering what you might know about them. Do you still get that magazine about all the crank religions and pseudosciences?”

“
Skeptical Inquirer
. Oh yes, I’m still an addict. And they have had a couple of articles about Boscage in recent issues.”

“Boscage is the head of the cult?”

“Maybe. If he’s still alive. There seems to be some question about that.

It’s a very shadowy organization. Not to say flaky. Why do you ask? You know someone involved with them?”

Patrick nodded. “The son of one of our parishioners. And I can’t say more than that. They approached me in confidence. And I recalled that I’d heard you mention them a while back. So I thought I’d ask you what you remember about them.”

“Basically, you want to know: Should the kid’s parents be worried?”

Patrick nodded.

“Well, they probably should. I hate to have to say so, since I was a fan of Boscage as a writer back in the seventies. But when he got to be a guru, then—” Peter rolled his eyes discreetly and did a sotto voce imitation of the
Twilight Zone
theme song.

“What exactly do his followers believe?”

“You name it, they’ll believe it. I’m not really exaggerating. Boscage had a fertile imagination as an SF writer, and when he went around the bend, he continued to have a fertile imagination.”

“Then you think he was crazy?”

“What’s the alternative? Believing he really was abducted by dogheaded aliens in UFOs? Believing his soul has been recycled about once a century ever since the sinking of Atlantis? Believing there has been a conspiracy directed against Adolf Boscage, personally, for the last couple millennia, masterminded by clandestine Albigensian heretics who have infiltrated almost every organization and business Boscage has ever bumped against, including the Boy Scouts? Excuse me if I sound like a secular humanist party pooper, but somehow it is easier for me to believe that Adolf Boscage was crazy than to believe all that.”

“Of course,” Patrick hastened to agree. “What I meant was, he might simply be a con man. A manipulator. A liar who wasn’t afraid to tell his lies on the grandest scale.”

“Yes, that’s a possibility. He certainly was a bullshit artist whose bull got out of control, but I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt as to his being sincere. In that way he’s a lot like Philip K. Dick, if you ever read the book he wrote called
Valis
. Boscage’s followers are another matter.
They
are scary.”

“That’s what worries me. I gather there was a civil case against them in California, and the person who was suing them simply disappeared. And in other cases that have been settled out of court, no one will say what was at issue.”

“From what I’ve read, it usually involved abduction in some form or other. Or people being detained against their wills after they’d gone off to what they thought was a rehab center. In fact, Patrick, it occurs to me that you may be inviting exactly the same kind of legal difficulties with the new project you’re talking about. That wouldn’t be what all this is about, would it?”

Patrick waved aside the question with a look of annoyance. “No, not at all. What I would be interested in knowing, though, is, what is it that’s behind their success? What makes people join? What do the Receptivists offer that makes their cult different from other fringe groups?”