Which raises the question, come to think of it, of who it is I’m really writing for.
FOR TWO WEEKS after leaving Menügayan’s brownstone I heard no news at all, and I began to suspect — at times, even to hope — that I’d misunderstood the nature of our bargain. But I was foolish to doubt her. She was hard at work all the while, woodshedding and calculating, fussing and scheming, consulting the Synchronology Codex and game theory textbooks and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as tireless as the light cone of chronology itself.
In a more simpatico age — Hoover-era America, for example — there’s no telling how far Menügayan’s star might have risen. As it was, she was a has-been cult administrator, excommunicated at forty, making her living selling fanboy paraphernalia in shabby back-lot booths at “geek conventions.” I never did manage to discover why the UCS cut her loose, but it was painfully clear that the animosity she felt toward them (and toward Haven, in particular) had once been unconditional devotion. I wasn’t able to figure out what sort of deal she’d cut, either, though she never denied that her brownstone was the property of the Church. At the end of the day, Mrs. Haven — as Menügayan herself would have put it — none of these considerations mattered. She was going to bring you back to me. All further questions smacked of self-indulgence.
Menügayan hadn’t deigned to share the details of her scheme, but I had no doubt that she had one, and that the obliteration of your marriage was only a preliminary gambit, one small relay in the circuit she was building. She’d been a high-ranking financial officer in the UCS, apparently, and knew enough about the First Listener’s machinations to cause him significant grief. She was living in gilded exile on West Tenth Street, in a kind of tacit house arrest, like a disgraced Hero of the Revolution maintained in watchful comfort in some quaint suburban dacha. She spied on you, Mrs. Haven, because she had a spy’s nature — and because you passed her front door every day. She had her comics and her latex masks and you, and nothing else.
Nothing else, that is, until I came along. Then all at once she had an audience.
“I was confused when the New Era kicked in, Tolliver — believe me. For years the Church had been a community, a spiritual order, cut off from the world and proud of it. Then from one day to the next, the Listener does a backflip — a lutz, even. A triple axel. Starts obsessing about the age, the government, the ‘times we live in.’ The point had always been that we lived outside of time, detached from any age — that this particular iteration packed no more oomph than any other. No true end and no beginning. The Great Rotation and all that honeyfuggle. Do you know about the Great Rotation?” She gave a rueful laugh. “Of course you do. You’re Orson Card Tolliver’s son. You’re basically an Iterant by birth.”
“Could you slow down a little, Julia? I’m not sure—”
“I had no clue what he was after when the Business first got started. That’s what he called it, with a capital b: the Business, as opposed to the Church. It began with fund-raisers: fund-raisers for no one knew what. Fund-raisers to assist in the raising of funds. The rest of us went along in a daze, taking our cues from him like we’d always done, blinking like rabbits in the glare of the marquee. We were scared shitless, really. Trying to figure out the Listener’s angle was like trying to do a bong hit in a blizzard.
“Anyway, so. The cable hadn’t even been switched on in our Upper East Side office before he’d pegged the local neocons as easy touches. They consider themselves in a permanent state of siege: darkies and trannies and health-care reformers are scheming to eat their brains and fuck their wives while they’re asleep, and they’ll throw cash at anyone who keeps the night-light on. The Listener saw that right away. It was vaudeville to him, pure and simple, but they sucked it down like cherry-flavored pop. Precious few in the Church got to see this, of course, but I did. I got a fat hairy eyeful. Not that it helped me any — NB, my current life. At the end of the day, as I’ve mentioned before, the day’s over.”
Her mouth snapped shut at that point and her eyelids came down, as if she were waiting for me to insert another coin. I’d been halfway to the vestibule already — just a few steps from Bilbo — but I decided to try once more to get things clear. I looked back at her there, sitting Indian-style on the sofa like some sort of mood-stabilized Buddha, looking about as sentient as the suit of mithril on the wall behind her.
“Why are you telling me all this, Julia?”
“If we’re going to smite him, you need to be briefed.”
“But why not just forget him? Why not pack up all of your — all of your collectibles, if that’s the right term, and find some other—”
“He used me,” she said, in an almost inaudible whisper. “He used all of us. And now he’s using her.”
“Okay, Julia. What exactly—”
“Enough with the seventh degree, Tolliver. My origin story is not for your tender ears. Here’s the rub: you and I have a common objective. We both want to see R. P. Haven tied to a telephone pole by his own intestines, with crows and starlings pecking at his eyes. We want to see him strapped to the hood of his midnight-blue Lexus, heading the wrong way up FDR Drive, with his palms nailed to the sunroof, and his beautiful legs—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Julia. I’d like to see him gone, I admit, but I don’t necessarily—”
“Of course you don’t, Tolliver. You just want to take his wife away. Now run along home and think on what I’ve told you. Namaste.”
* * *
It was a long walk home that night, long and muddled and fraught, as Menügayan had known that it would be. I felt somehow polluted by what she’d told me, and chagrined at how greedily I’d listened; but that was only part of what I felt. There was something else there as well, glimmering up through my revulsion: something sharp-edged and precious, like a piece of jewelry seen through muddy water. There was excitement, Mrs. Haven, and the illicit thrill that covert knowledge brings. I didn’t trust Menügayan — I was a pawn to her at best, I knew, and at worst some sort of sacrificial lamb — but I trusted in her hatred of the Husband.
By the time I’d locked the door of Van’s studio behind me, a pressure was building behind my sternum — a steady, transistorish buzzing — that made it hard to keep my thoughts in order. Splayed across the shabby sofa with your letter in my lap, beginning to lose sensation in my extremities, I decided the feeling was either hope or cardiac arrest. I tore your letter open with my teeth.
Dear—
The truth is I don’t know what to call you. “Walter” is the name of the person I’d been under the misapprehension of knowing, but it was a beautiful misapprehension, so I’ll stick with it for just a little longer. I’ve allowed myself to write you one last letter.
I’m so depressed and knocked sideways by what the Husband and certain others have told me re: this person called “Walter,” or the person behind him, that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s possible you’ll never find this note. But that would be a shame, because it’s important to me that this message reach its intended recipient, whoever he is, and that he understand that I made this decision — to go away, I mean — by myself, without any pressure or advice from anybody. I don’t want any advice or any explanation either. I want to get on a plane and just go. No more time