Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter
The session began with a reading:
I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep
And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre and its cruel Shadow.
I see the Past, Present and Future, existing all at once
Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose
.
Having declaimed these lines in a loud, stagy voice, Sam closed the book like a Bible and looked at us in silence, as though to gauge their effect on us. After a protracted pause, he went on in a deliberately contrasted tone, quiet and husky, as though talking to himself.
“You’ve listened to the word of God. But have you heard it? Do you understand it? Do you know what it means?”
I glanced at my neighbors. The word of God? I was thinking. But none of them appeared to share my consternation.
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS?” Sam screamed suddenly at the top of his voice.
No one answered. I had a terrible urge to say “Beats my pair of jacks!” but in the circumstances I felt that such levity would be frowned on.
“Of course you don’t,” snapped Sam, answering his rhetorical question. “You don’t have the first fucking idea! Even the blowhards out there who are always ready to give attitude about the decisions I make. Especially them.”
He fixed Mark with a glare.
“If it wasn’t for me, you zit-brains would still be hanging out on some street corner trying to find the truth at the bottom of a quart of Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty. Think about that, next time you dare question the word of Los!”
I remembered the children addressing Sam that morning as “Los.” When I had asked him why, he’d told me that I should know the answer. At the time, I’d thought he was just being his usual smart-ass self, but now I realized he was right. Los, of course, was one of Blake’s allegorical characters. I couldn’t remember much about him, except that he was called “the Eternal Prophet.”
His introductory harangue over, Sam started in on his exposition of the text. This was unconventional, to say the least. “The Humanity in deadly sleep” supposedly referred to the masses of people living in ignorance of the truth. Commingled with them were “emanations” and “specters,” which Sam apparently conceived of as zombie-like creatures of human appearance but lacking a soul. He, Los the Prophet, had an overview of all time, past, present and future, and was engaged on a program to awaken “Albion”-the “Eternal Man”-from his ignorance and thus bring Time to an end.
This, I think, was the gist of Sam’s speech. Just like a regular preacher, however, he kept throwing in other snippets of text in an attempt to buttress his position with a show of scriptural authority.
“Blake says of these specters, ‘To be all evil, all reversed and forever dead: knowing and seeing life, yet living not,’ chapter ten, lines fifty-seven and eight, and again in chapter eight, lines thirteen through eighteen, ‘My Emanation is dividing and thou my Spectre art divided against me. But mark I will compel thee to assist me in my terrible labors. To beat these hypocritic Selfhoods on the Anvils of bitter Death I am inspired. I act not for myself: for Albion’s sake I now am what I am, a horror and an astonishment.’
“And in line thirty-five he says, ‘For I am one of the living: dare not to mock my inspired fury!’ Think about it, you guys! Anyone out there who figures just because he knows the truth means he doesn’t need to respect discipline and absolute obedience needs to read chapter eleven, lines five through seven, ‘Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems; that whenever any Spectre began to devour the Dead, he might feel the pain as if a man gnawed his own tender nerves.’ Now you might say, ‘Huh? Specters can’t feel pain, any more than the dead.’ Right?
“Wrong! These are no ordinary specters! These are the ‘cruel Shadows’ Blake talks about in our text for today. The truth has been revealed to them, but they have rebelled against Los’s System and tried to go their own way. They have been received into the body of Albion and granted the gift of eternal life, but they prefer to ‘devour the Dead.’ And their punishment is to be cast out and hunted down, made to ‘feel the pain as if a man gnawed his own tender nerves.’”
And so on. For all Sam’s talk of disobedience and rebellion, every single person there crouched docilely on the floor for almost three hours while Sam ranted and raved and swaggered and strutted in front of us, cowing us into submission with his lunatic gloss on Blake’s allegory. I tried not to listen, to think of other things, or of nothing, but Sam’s voice kept breaking through my defenses.
At one point he held up the book he was reading from to show us one of the engraved illustrations, and I suddenly realized why the painted designs on the VW van had seemed to familiar. They were all motifs from Blake’s work, airbrushed on to the VW to form a collage. “Blake is very important,” Sam had told me when we met back in Minneapolis. I was beginning to understand just how important he was to Sam, but the key to the whole charade continued to elude me.
Then, at last, it was over. Sam stormed through a final bout of bullying, exhortatory rhetoric, then abruptly turned and stalked off without another word, disappearing through the same door from which he had emerged that morning, and slamming it behind him. For a moment no one moved, as though they were awaiting permission to dismiss. Then Mark, followed closely by Rick and two other men, got up and everyone started to stir.
I got painfully to my feet and wandered outside. The weather had turned again. A cold wind seethed in the woods all around, and ridges of slowly moving gray cloud covered the sky. I went back inside, put another log on the fire and tried to make sense of what I had just witnessed.
In principle, the setup seemed simple enough. Sam had created a religion using Blake’s work as his bible and casting himself in the role of Los, the prophet. What I didn’t understand, no matter which way I twisted it around, was how he had convinced his followers to buy into it. What were they getting out of it, except an obligatory series of lectures from someone whose only distinction was that his interpretation of the subject was even wackier than Blake’s own?
Still, what did I care? None of this had anything to do with me, I reminded myself Meanwhile I decided to solve the more specific mystery of Andrea’s whereabouts. I went over to the door through which Sam had disappeared and knocked gently. There was no answer, so I turned the handle and peered in. What I saw was so amazing that I opened the door and went inside.
The dimensions and the construction of the room were all it had in common with the one I had been allocated, or the two next door where Rick and Andy slept. The floor was thickly carpeted, there was a window with curtains, the air was warm and dry, the lighting bright yet muted. But what stood out above all was the quantity and quality of consumer durables on view. There was a Bose home-theater stereo system right next to a fifty-inch Mitsubishi slimline television. A desk to one side supported an Amerigo multimedia computer with CD-ROM and assorted peripherals, including what looked like a laser printer. A vintage Stratocaster guitar lay on the sofa. The cellular phone Sam had mentioned, an expensive Motorola flip-down model, was on the matching chair opposite. There were shelves and shelves of CDs and videocassettes, and the small amount of vacant wall space was covered in framed color reproductions of illustrations from the Blake canon.
I stood staring at all this in amazement. I had figured that Sam must be doing all right from whatever scam he had going, but I’d had no idea just how sweet it was. How the hell did he manage to justify this kind of lifestyle when his followers were living in boot-camp conditions all around him?
Although the room was empty, I could hear noises from next door, the kind I associated with someone taking a shower. I wandered over to the shelves and perused Sam’s CD collection. This provided another surprise. There was some jazz, and a few reissues of the rock albums we had used to listen to back in Minneapolis, but the bulk of the collection was classical. Wagner was largely represented-there were three complete Ring cycles alone-but also Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich. I moved on to the videos, but most of them were blank tapes whose labeling-Andy (Russell): Kansas City-made no sense to me. I was examining one of these more closely when I happened to glance to my right.
I had been so preoccupied by all the things that were in the room that I had totally overlooked the one thing that wasn’t: a bed. I’d also forgotten that Sam couldn’t be taking a shower, because the water shortage on the island meant that such an amenity was unavailable even to him. The solution to both these puzzles now became clear. While Mark, Rick and Andy had to make do with a single room each, Sam had commandeered an entire wing for his own quarters. The room I had entered was just the first of three in line. In the next I noticed yet more incongruous luxuries, including a pool table and what looked like a cue case mounted on the wall. But my attention was drawn by the third room, at the end of the suite, where Sam stood groaning before a woman on her knees who was enthusiastically blowing him.
Jostling somewhere at the back of my mind was the conviction that the woman was Andrea. That explained why she had not attended the reading. She was Sam’s personal sex slave and had to remain in his quarters in order to service him as soon as his performance was concluded. I left quickly, closing the door quietly behind me. A group of about half a dozen people were sitting in front of the TV. They all stared at me as I emerged, and I realized that I was still holding the videocassette I had taken from the shelf.
“Hi, guys,” I said as casually as I could, and headed off across the hall to my room. The contrast with the sybaritic conditions I had just left made it seem even more squalid than before. Setting the cassette down on the chest of drawers, which was still full of Mark’s clothing, I lay down on the bed and tried to rest. But it was impossible. The more I tried to relax, the more agitated I became. After a few minutes I gave up and returned to the hall.
It was another fifteen minutes before Sam finally emerged. The transformation from his previous appearance could not have been more marked. It was like glimpsing an actor leaving the stage door of a theater. His charismatic aura had totally vanished. He was one of us again, a mere human, with human needs and frailties.
He saw me sitting by the fireplace and came over.
“How’s it going?” he asked dully.
I couldn’t make out if his subdued mood was the result of his thespian or sexual exertions.
“Good,” I said. “Great talk you gave there. Kind of amazed me, though. I never expected to hear you lecturing on William Blake. Back when we took that class together, I recall you saying-”
Sam held a finger to his lips.
“Hey, don’t scare the horses!”
I smiled back. For the first time, Sam had made a clear distinction between me and the suckers he was doing such a successful number on. Emboldened by this, I decided to relieve my hurt about the sex scene I had witnessed with a little gentle joshing.
“The only thing I don’t get is why Andrea didn’t show. How come she gets to play hooky?”
I paused significantly.
“Or is she on some special duty roster?”
I was prepared for Sam to look sheepish. Instead, he shot me a glance I found unnervingly penetrating.
“Andrea? You interested in her?”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s already spoken for.”
Sam just shrugged.
“Help yourself. She’s no one’s squeeze, far as I know. I used to give her a turn once in a while, but now I’ve got Ellie to take care of that. You met Ellie? Cute little thing. Just turned sixteen, but she’s got tits out to here, firm as avocados. Loves to fuck, too. They all do, but the young ones even more. Validates them, see? They’re still unsure about this adult stuff, how they fit in, all that shit. They see that look on your face as you cream into them, they know they’ve just joined the club. Turns them on like crazy.”
He slapped my shoulder.
“Good thinking, Phil! Get yourself a woman. I’d go for Melissa if I were you. Tall blond number? Used to be a junkie, but she’s straight now. Kinda flat-chested, but man, that pussy! Hasn’t seen much action, either, since Dale left. That’s where I would head first, tell you the truth. But if you got the hots for Andrea, I can fix that up, no prob.”
“Whoa, hold on there!” I cried, trying unsuccessfully to regain the safe ground of masculine bonding. “All I asked was why she wasn’t around for your little pep talk. I didn’t say anything about wanting to put any moves on her.”
Sam stood looking down at me. His smile had disappeared. I suddenly realized how dumb it was to think that I could ever find a niche for myself in something as dippy as what was going on here. I had to go, and the sooner the better, before anyone’s feelings were hurt.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I told him, getting to my feet, “I think maybe I’d better be moving on. It’s been great to see you again, and this place is certainly interesting, but, you know, it’s not really my thing.”
He looked at me in that set, level way he had when he felt challenged.
“You want to go?”
I nodded. He stared at me some more.
“When?”
“Any time tomorrow would be good.”
I had expected protests, but he merely nodded slowly, as though he regretted my decision but understood. Then he turned away.
“I’ll see what we can do about that,” he said.
Sam didn’t appear at dinner that evening, but Andrea did. She sat opposite me at the table, and kept looking pointedly in my direction. I didn’t know how to respond. My main feeling was one of guilt for having shown an interest in her in the first place. If she was as desperate as Sam had suggested, this might loom a lot larger for her than it did for me. But the fact remained that I was leaving the next day, and that I would never see her again. I eventually decided that the only responsible course of action was to ignore her. I finished my meal as quickly as possible and then retired to my room, where I went to bed with a copy of Lewis and Clark’s journal of their expedition to the coast in 1804. The account of their harrowing experiences put my little problems in perspective. It also put me to sleep.
I was awakened by the sound of voices. I couldn’t distinguish what they were saying, but the tone was angry, a violent clash of wills and egos. Mark’s smash-mouth delivery was recognizable enough, as were Sam’s frosty responses, but their dialogue was punctuated at intervals by two other voices which I could not identify.
