Let Them Look West, page 24
“Would you like to walk through and take a look around?” Justine asked.
Rob nodded and they diverted to the right. Under an arbor of vines, a large wrought iron gate stood open. The path inside turned to brick and branched out in right angles to other subsequent walkways. Beds of plants bordered the path on both sides. The monk moved ahead and led them down the avenues in a labyrinthian route that seemed to make sense only to him. Justine explained that Manuel spent much of his free time either working in the gardens or reading and reflecting there. The animation in his movements made his investment obvious. He would stop and stoop to indicate a bed of plants and then lean down to place a finger beneath a petal or leaf and gently raise it while explaining every detail.
“Many of the plants here are native to the state. These shrub-like trees with the delicate petals are dogwood. You can see them all over the garden. In this bed is Blue Flax. Over here you can see a small white flower. It is known as a Woodland Star.”
They passed through the center, where a circular area contained a large fountain. A number of people read or talked quietly in small groups of two or three. The whole place was picturesque and very peaceful, and Rob much preferred it to the bizarre tumult at the summit. The monk was distracted at some point and wandered off by himself. Rob got turned around in a maze of hedges and realized that he was alone. After a minute of walking aimlessly, he realized that the paths were not even a maze, but merely three circles contained within one another in descending size with an opening at either end. He escaped after the realization and spilled out into a clearing with a mound of grass and a large voluminous tree. It reminded him of an immense brain, with the multitudes of splitting branches forming neural pathways and constituting its amoebic form. It was very quiet and no one else was around. A circle of curved stone benches rested around the border of the grassy rise where the tree rested.
CHAPTER
12
“I
t’s a Plains Cottonwood. It was here before the garden, but they moved it so that it could be in just the right spot.”
Rob jumped slightly at the unexpected voice. Justine had followed him through the hedges.
“It’s very picturesque,” he observed.
A long silence passed between them. Finally, she continued. “I am sorry for being unfair to you. It’s not right of me, especially when I’m representing my uncle as well. He was the one who agreed to host you and talk with you.”
“Any idea why?” Rob asked, turning to scrutinize her.
One of her arms hung straight down and she held the other up to rest her hand on the opposite shoulder. She looked tired, not defeated or demoralized, but tired. She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I honestly don’t know. Part of me thinks he wants mixed news. With the whole frenzy that’s bound to come with the Wyoming dollar, I think he wants something else out there too, and not even necessarily positive, just something else.”
“I called him, not the other way around,” Rob replied.
“All I mean is maybe he would have said no unless this other business was in the works. Maybe, when you called his office and asked for an interview, he realized it would be a good way to muddy the waters or relieve some pressure on that other front.”
“I think you probably overestimate my influence in the media sphere. I’m not exactly H. L. Mencken.”
She let an amused breath out through her nose, jostling her head back slightly with the sound. “What’s it like anyway being a journalist in the city?”
“Not glamorous. Everything they say about journalists drinking too much, having too high an opinion of themselves and too low an opinion of other people is all true. That’s not to say there aren’t decent writers and honest people, but they never make it much of anywhere in the business. Like anything else related to politics and media, it all comes down to who you know and how well you get along with them.”
“I’m a little surprised,” she mused. “That you’re so honest about it. How do you reconcile that? With being honest and trying to move up in that world?”
“You don’t. You forget about it or don’t think about it. You have to live in the ambiguity of it all and hope that, at some point every once in a while, you can reorient yourself for long enough to say something real about something that matters, whether you believe in it or not.”
“That sounds a lot like going along to get along.”
“It is.” Rob confirmed. “And you just hope that, in the process of going and getting, that you don’t become so much a fixture of the enduring mechanism that you can’t find a damaged piece every once in a while that could use some attention.”
“Survival first and truth second?” she asked with a raised brow.
“That’s how it has to be. Survival is truth,” he replied.
She mulled it over for a few seconds. “So, what do you think about everything? The state, the monument, my uncle. Everything.”
“I think it’s insane,” he stated bluntly. “I can respect his ability to accomplish what he has, but I can’t make any sense of the why. Once you get too far into the realm of formulating what you can touch and see on behalf of things that you can’t, then you lose me. I don’t know how so many people follow him.” He held up a hand to indicate a qualification. “No, I get that he is charismatic and that the cultural trends have worked in his favor and all that, but I don’t understand how so many people are willing to change the way they live for the sake of a man’s ideas, no matter how lofty. It’s not putting on the team colors or singing the fight song over the weekend. We are talking about a big cultural shift here.”
“No part of you at all finds any of it inspiring?”
“I can respect the dedication, sure, but the devotion, the willingness to be a part of something so radical. I have a hard time understanding it.”
“You think it’s radical?”
“Well, yeah,” he deadpanned. “You don’t?”
“The world writ large became radical by degrees in its own way. A lot of people look at the governor’s movement as a correction to a hundred years of a steady march of radicalization.”
“Ok, so reactionary for today is normal for the nineteenth century? What is the standard then? Mid-twentieth century? The middle ages? What is the perfect balance that modern culture has diverted from so much? Throughout all of time everything is in constant fluctuation. Clinging to a snapshot of culture is just as unnatural as you see modernity to be.”
“It’s not a snapshot,” she insisted. “It’s a way of living that is most common with the massive majority of human history. Hard work, respect for the divine, connection to the land, investment in physical community. Those are all things that everyone is losing and have never been lost before. Are you really going to deny that?”
“Then what is the fix? An artificial approximation of the conditions that existed when mankind was healthier in your estimation? How is that any less synthetic than living your entire life in a virtual reality machine?”
She made a frustrated sound in her throat. “Because it isn’t virtual! Do you honestly believe that eschewing the lifestyle of the common denominator of society is somehow unreal? What is your measure of reality then, since you seem to be the arbiter of such things? You said it yourself, that you go along to get along. You abstract the world to escape its consequences. In my mind that makes you one of the most unqualified people to talk with any authority about what should or ought to be. You have abrogated your ability to speak on the subject.”
“Hey, you asked for my opinion on this place and everything. If you don’t like it, then just revoke my ability to have one, I guess. You will make an excellent future Governor Alexander.”
“Just because everyone has an opinion doesn’t mean they’re all good ones.”
“How predictably authoritarian,” he snorted and then paused to calm himself. “Look, I didn’t want to have an argument, alright? I was hoping you would just take what I said clinically, ok?”
She visibly made an effort to calm herself as well, taking a deep breath. “You have to understand why I’m defensive. Not that many people are even willing to consider that we aren’t all crazy. It gets to you after a while.”
“I can understand that,” he admitted. “I haven’t exactly been the peerless high and mighty judge here. I’ve had my own difficulties since arriving.”
She shot him a suspicious look. “What does that mean?”
“Walden,” he stated simply.
She laughed. “He’s playing with you like a cat with a mouse, isn’t he? That’s not surprising at all.”
“I’m glad you find it so amusing,” he grumbled. “That man is a psychopath.”
“He doesn’t have a violent bone in his body,” she insisted. “He’s trying to throw you off psychologically. It’s what he does with everyone he thinks could hurt my uncle in any way.”
“Consider my fears assuaged.”
“Hey, this is your job. I’m not going to try to stop him. May the better man win.”
“You know, you’re kind of sadistic,” Rob observed. “You’re not as bad as he is, but you have your own methods. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
She gave him a look of very genuine confusion. “Have you ever considered that you’re just a paranoid sort of person?”
“Oh, I am,” he confirmed, “but just enough to be more observant than most people.”
Just as she was about to put together a reply, which judging by her expression would have been quite scathing, Manuel emerged from the hedges with a blissful look on his face.
“Ah, there you are. I stepped away back to my brothers for midday prayers. I was able to find you because I could hear your voices. I hope there wasn’t an argument.”
“Not really,” Justine assured him. “Just a heated discussion.”
The monk gave each of them a surprisingly mischievous look. “Alright.” The single word was full of observation about what he really knew of the situation. He then turned to Rob. “I forgot to ask you what you thought of the display at the summit. I don’t expect you to view it through the same lens obviously.”
Justine was giving Rob a defiant expression, perhaps daring him to be as blunt with Manuel as he had with her.
“Technically, it was very impressive. It far exceeded anything I could even imagine. As far as the experience itself, it was a bit overwhelming. Honestly I would have a difficult time trying to describe how I felt during the whole experience.”
It was an honest answer, and as far as he was willing to go. There was no point in delving into any of the details of how uncomfortable it had been. The monk’s courtesy toward him did not deserve such naked criticism.
They walked the garden for a little longer before Manuel asked if they wanted to have lunch at the Benedictine’s small abbey. Rob and Justine agreed, and they picked up Daniel at the visitor’s center, where he was loitering around the entrance looking bored.
The place where the Benedictines lived was a small collection of three timber buildings and a barn. Each was simple, rectangular and unrefined. One was the chapel where they prayed, another was the bunkhouse with their simple sleeping quarters, and the third and largest contained a dining area with a large kitchen and work area. The metal sided barn out back provided space for the goats during the cold months. A large yard surrounded the structure and contained a garden and covered space for chopping and storing firewood.
Three other monks lived there with Manuel. They were all American and rather young. Manuel was likely the oldest. When the visitors entered, they were in the kitchen preparing a meal. They introduced themselves one by one as Samuel, Henry, and Mitchell. Rob was not sure what exactly one asks a monk in his home setting when it came to small talk, so he stood back and observed.
Henry, a tall and sandy haired young man in his mid-twenties, was the most talkative aside from Manuel. He explained a little about life at the monument, their hours of prayer, and the sort of work they did. The others labored quietly. Samuel, a short and stocky young man, brought them glasses of water.
“We eat very simply. I hope it is to your liking,” Henry relayed at one point.
“Honestly a boiled shoe would be delicious to me right now. I’m famished,” Daniel commented, and then added: “No offense.”
The monks smiled pleasantly. “None taken,” Henry assured. “I hope you like goat.”
“I thought you fellows didn’t eat meat,” Daniel replied.
“We only eat it three days a week,” Manuel explained, “and in small quantities. Most often we have poultry or fish as a protein, but our abbot has found that caring for and using animals is beneficial to a healthy diet and work routines. We catch many of our own fish at the lake.”
After a prayer, Henry served the simple meal of dark bread, cooked goat meat, and greens from the garden. It was not a culinary masterpiece by any stretch, but Rob was grateful. The food was fresh and hearty. The monks ate in silence, as was their custom, and the visitors respected their time of reflection. Rob imagined that during the bitterly cold Wyoming winters this place was harder living than most could endure.
After they had finished, the monks returned to the kitchen to clean up and Manuel explained that he had shirked his duties for long enough. He walked them back down the dirt path leading from the small abbey to the visitor’s center. “Let me give a prayer of blessing before you go.” They stopped and he stood in front of them with his head slightly bowed and hands clasped. “May God and his excellent servant Saint Benedict help you to walk in grace and protect you from wickedness, and may you be blessed in your journeys from here. Amen.”
“Thank you,” Justine said earnestly with a smile.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Rob added.
“And for the prayer,” Daniel tacked onto the end.
With one final wave they went their separate ways: the monk back to his brothers and the three visitors back to the monument. The number of people traversing the paths and moving up and down the mountain had increased significantly.
“What now?” Rob asked. “Was there anything else here that you guys wanted to show me?”
“The helicopter’s all fueled up. We can go anywhere,” Daniel replied with a grin. “Hell, I could show you some pretty good stunt flying on the way back up.”
“That’s not happening,” Justine stated sternly. She checked the time on her phone. “We should probably head back.”
They returned down the pathway to the landing area. The mountain loomed over their shoulders. Once they reached the helicopter, Daniel repeated his earlier routine of pre-flight checks as Rob and Justine settled into the back.
“José Manuel is an interesting man,” Rob mused aloud.
“He is uncommonly decent,” Justine replied.
The helicopter came to life again. The engine and rotors slid up a scale of mechanical tones with increasing intensity. Daniel was less talkative on the return trip. Justine was placid and silent and rolled gazes to various fixed points within the cabin and outside. Rob was pensive and content to sit quietly as the throbbing machinery provided a bed of white noise for his fitful daydreams. He stared disinterestedly at the passing plains below.
As time passed with nothing said, Rob began to feel a little cold and distant from the idea of other human beings, even more so than usual. All he had seen at the monument convinced him that there are distinct groups of people who are irreconcilably different. He had very little in common with those transfixed by the symbolism in the stations along the ascent. He had nothing in common with those who had been weeping on the summit at the electric Jesus display. It had meant nothing to him, or if not nothing, then it was slightly unnerving: a childhood fear not yet remembered with a smile and a shake of the head. Standing up there on the summit, he had been four feet tall again and peering goose-fleshed into the yawning, dark windows of an abandoned house at the edge of the neighborhood. Perhaps that was merely his own closest association with nothingness as a concrete idea. Nothing as a concrete idea. He chuckled to himself.
Possibly this is what Nico had meant when he or she had written that they thought the two of them were made of the same materials. Had Nico felt the same crawling nothingness with enveloping strength as the state which was home changed all around? Had Nico gone to the monument and felt the same heat of embarrassment for everyone gathered around?
Rob watched the peaks of the Wyomings go by in reverse order and thought of the choir in the mountain and what Justine had said about the importance of someone always being present for the endless cycle of crucifixion. He was still uncertain if it was all just pseudo-philosophical posturing disguising the simplistic, hard wired neurological desire to believe. When reduced to such mechanisms, was any belief more legitimate than another, regardless of the argument’s complexity or epistemological intricacy? Was he abstracting himself from the world to escape its consequences?
All such thinking only made him feel colder, so he sat in silence still and considered only stupid and pointless subjects for the rest of the flight.
They touched down at Camp Hope a little after three PM to a flurry of activity. Banks was pacing near the landing area. They could first see him from the air as a distant dot moving in tight ellipses. As the helicopter powered down and they clambered out, he stopped and stood in a sagging posture.
“What is it?” Justine called out to him once it was quiet enough to be heard.
He walked over to them while wringing his hands anxiously. “Department of the Treasury lawyers are supposed to be here by the end of the day to talk to the governor.”
