Very little appeared beyond these official accounts. The Times ran a feature on the Devoted Ones in Timmerman’s campaign, and more broadly on the place of the Living World in contemporary society, “two generations after the Revolution”. Like so many Times articles, it managed to sound deep without saying much of anything. The Washington Post and The Miami Herald of Power and a few other papers ran editorials. None of them said much of anything, though the Post warned of the need for humans to “make the tough decisions in the clear light of day”.
More interesting to me was a sense of the campaign itself—what Timmerman was trying to achieve. I’m not sure what I expected to find, maybe a lot of high rhetoric without any content or follow-up. And maybe, considering what I’d seen and what Alison had told me, I expected sexual imagery to inflate his speeches. The fact is, Timmerman actually said very little about sex. His speeches, especially in recent weeks, were indeed spiced with “liberating all levels, including the intimate teachings of the Spirit”, and other elegances. But mostly he stayed with the issues that had launched him—consumer safety, corporate fraud, government protection of insurance companies and other industrial monopolies. To my further surprise, his cadres had shown themselves to be remarkably effective, winning a range of battles, either through the courts or through boycotts, organized letter writing, depossession enactments and other direct actions.
Timmerman had begun his career with a highly publicized attack on Sacred Motors, charging that the hood totem for their Nightleopard car failed to establish soul configurations for safe journeys. In fact, Timmerman demonstrated, the supposed guardian did nothing at all and might as well not have been there.
Timmerman’s headdress made its first appearance during the Sacred Motors’ campaign when he began doing daily protection enactments outside corporate headquarters, enactments which attracted more and more people as news reports surfaced of Nightleopard accidents on deserted roads in clear weather, or new cars breaking down or catching fire. Without his enactments, Timmerman claimed, the disasters would have been more frequent and worse. Nevertheless, SM managed to get a court order forcing him to stop. Refusing, Timmerman went to jail, but a higher court ruled that the mass enactments were a collection of “individual spiritual events” rather than an organized ceremony, which meant that SM would have needed restraining orders against every single person holding up a placard, or burning flash powder on pictures of SM’s CEO, or moving dummies in radio-controlled models of Nightleopard cars. Finally, the company gave up and released the records of the work done to draw up proper sanctification for the car before release to general sales. Two weeks later the car was withdrawn.
While none of Timmerman’s later cases had attracted that much publicity, his workers, known as “the barefoot lawyers” for their fanaticism, had scored a run of large and small successes, taking on everything from soup companies to federal bureaucracies. As I skimmed the press reports, I noticed all the hard work behind Timmerman’s rhetoric, the nuts and bolts and research and carefully built legal challenges that had made a registered sanctified letter from Consumer Liberation a terrifying sight for any executive or government official.
When the stories approached the present, say the past six months, something else emerged. I began to pick up a shift in emphasis from manufactured products and insurance companies to the banking system. There were charges and actions against specific banks, accusations of corruption, mismanagement, bad loans and even bribes, but more and more Timmerman had begun to attack the structure as a whole, claiming that the laws themselves undermined the national economy through leveraged buyouts financed by unregulated banks, manipulated stock investments using information about paper loans and “a suicidal breakdown of the necessary barriers between the people who lend the money and the people who spend it”. There were rumours that Timmerman was planning to sue the Spiritual Development Agency for permission to lead an enactment in the Stock Exchange, by the body of Rebecca Rainbow, creator of the modern banking system in the chaos after the Revolution.
All this took me some three days to scrape together. I could have spent weeks reading everything, but I just wanted an outline, a silhouette, of Timmerman and his organization. My real target was still the Choir of Angels, and in particular my pet fascination, the Friend lurking in the background, Margaret 23. And about her, I could get no fix at all.
After three days, I found myself slouched in a library chair, my hands jammed into the pockets of my baggy jeans, as I growled at a stack of magazines. What was it about Tunnel Light? What was she doing there? Alison would know something, or at least have the resources for me to find out. I snarled once more at the magazines, and then began gathering them together to return them to their bins.
I headed home and booted up the computer. When I was learning to work graphics programs, I taught myself some other tricks as well. Ways of breaking into files, cracking codes, all that good stuff. For a while, it meant hanging around with some extremely obnoxious boys, but once I got the feel of it I could continue on my own. At the time, I told myself it was just something to do, a game, and besides, if some people could do such things, why shouldn’t I be one of them? Now, watching the screen, I wondered just why investigatory skills had been so important to me.
I was about to try some routines, pick my way into a few locked boxes, when I suddenly stopped and stared at the screen. Don’t be paranoid, I scolded myself. No one’s watching you. And besides, you know how to stay anonymous, right? That is the point, isn’t it? But I still turned off the machine.
Two hours later, I had checked into a hotel in midtown, the kind of place Mid-Westerners check into after saving up for their trip to the big city to see some skyscrapers and Broadway musicals. Claiming my cousin was going to join me, I rented two adjoining rooms with a connecting door. After paying cash up front, so I wouldn’t have to use a credit card or my real name, I carried my suitcases up the stairs to the rooms and got to work. The rooms were lousy of course, no view other than the back of an office building and a loud banging from some nearby service room. Young single women have got to be the absolute bottom of the connector pole in the hotel managers’ guide to life. Still, I was only planning to stay for a few minutes, so it hardly mattered. All that really counted was that the hotel was large enough that you could dial the rooms directly, without having to go through a human-operated switchboard.
I bowed to the room guardian, a cute little thing on a table between the two beds, and scattered some rock salt, fresh basil and cookie crumbs taken from my own house around the base of the husk, which took the form of a matronly woman holding a bowl. Asking for a blessing for privacy and selfless purpose, I poured some whisky into the bowl, then sucked it up with a straw and spat it out onto the floor. Then I got to work.
From my suitcases I took out one of the two computers and a pair of modems. I hooked up the computer and one of the modems to the telephone in the first room and then the second modem to the telephone in my “cousin’s” room, finally running some cheap telephone cable (bought in Radio Temple in the Village) between the two modems. I only had to tell myself about twenty times, “Better paranoid than sorry.” Before leaving the rooms I set up a door switch with burglar tape, so that anyone opening either door would automatically shut off both phone lines.