Chapter 1
Wayne Dolan had attended a great University in the Mid-Atlantic Region, and while his classmates enjoyed beer parties, girlfriends, and football games, he had gravitated toward his own company. In the summers he had lived in the near-deserted residence halls to earn tuition money cleaning and refurbishing the giant university kitchens, and on blue weekend evenings, warm and still except for the hum of air-conditioning systems on the dark, vacant buildings, he had wandered the empty sidewalks of North Campus brooding on his loneliness and exaltation, imagining sometimes in the dusk that She walked toward him through a doorway in the air from Her distant realm.
Now that he was older he sometimes dreamed about the university town, but in his dreams it was enchanted, the great buildings of Central Campus rising like towers and battlements above an ancient forest, and on its outskirts great old houses overlooking a wooded shore.
Downtown he had met an overcoated woman who he realized was a goddess; he had followed a girl with a long, blonde braid who he knew was an angel, and slept with her in an old house hung with handmade quilts; he had swum from the wooded shore across a vast ocean until on a watery horizon he sighted in the mist a far green continent. On the night before Tom Del Mar called, he dreamed he was on Liberty Street near the old Liberty Theater; it was autumn, chilly and drizzling, and on the cracked sidewalk he met Her, ancient yet young, like spring, with her long silver-gold braid and luminous skin, and from her an intoxication radiated, so that the world became paradise, and he knew that he would never die.
#
He woke up looking at a wall.
It was that way every morning: a blank white wall and a faint sigh from the registers blowing stale apartment-building air. A sinking feeling came over him then, which he tried to resist at first, telling himself that this was the beginning of a new life, that today he would rise up and seize it. But there seemed to be a kind of sorcery in the silence and stale air and blank white wall, a numbness bespeaking apartment complexes with plush sales offices and gay flower beds in front, but disconcerting hints of depression in the "garden apartments" in back among their carelessly mown lawns, cheap trees, and access roads: the sink disposal that didn't work; the cigarette-butt smell of the carpet; the tiny, dirty balcony overlooking parking lots; a sullen smudge on the wall of the miniature living room; the faint sounds of other listless lives in other apartments: a brief hiss of water, the boom of a door closing, a hint of voices, of colorless music, the slow-moving, monotonous sunlight through venetian blinds.
Wayne rolled over, the bliss of his dream draining out of him. His cramped bedroom was a shambles. After eight months his clothes were still jumbled in cardboard boxes, a pile of dirty laundry reeking in the open closet. No bustle, no crying or fighting or crowing of children, no clatter of dishes (his dishes lay unwashed in the sink), no vacuuming, no female voice, or even his own male voice, because there was no one to talk to.
He had wanted Ann and the children to get the house, of course, and at first it had soothed him to visit there, as if it were an anchor to some kind of home life. But then he and Ann had had the terrible fight, and she had gotten a restraining order against him, and since then his older girl Alice was always too busy to talk on the phone; only the baby would get on and start to babble in his baby's voice, saying things Wayne couldn't understand.
Wayne had imagined something quite different during the months—years, even—that he had dreamed of divorce. His bachelor apartment would be small, certainly, but full of books, quiet and overlooking trees and the fall of a hill, so that in the evenings he would gaze out the window and think vast thoughts (in these daydreams, oddly, he smoked a pipe); and there would be women: young, educated, silky daughters of upper-class families. He had known these were fantasies, of course, but he had reasoned that out there somewhere must be a girl beautiful and young and educated that would love him, blonde with silken skin who unclothed was all catlike languor and fire, sighing, gasping, and sobbing in her light, bell-like voice when she reached orgasm. They sat in a quaint cafe and talked about Emily Bronte and Shakespeare, Benoit Mandelbrot and God, complexity and love and the structure of the universe, their eyes locked together, until he could feel the earth turning about him, the blood rushing in his veins, time bringing the sun to light the flowers in the window boxes, the rain to water them. In her eyes were meadows and forests, sunset on the ocean, dusk on a dock where they walked in the evening hand in hand. They were married in a dazzling church wedding, and he could beat all her clean-cut, handsome brothers at arm-wrestling; he had met them when she took him home to her parents at their big house on Martha's Vineyard. They went on a honeymoon in Aruba and she taught him scuba diving, and they spent every day in the crystalline blue waters, eating fresh crab, making love, and lying in the breezy shade of palm trees.
It wasn't impossible, was it? It could still happen to a good-looking, six-foot-tall man with thoughtful greyish eyes, a shock of unruly dark hair, thick arms and chest, even though he was 43 and getting creases in his forehead and at the corners of his mouth. And he was a novelist. Women loved novelists. Didn't they?
Yet so far something had prevented any part of this fantasy from coming true. It was a subject of speculation what that something was. For one thing, he had gotten into a bad habit of sleeping late, so that by the time he had taken a shower and eaten breakfast it was already afternoon, almost too late to do anything. Then he would usually either sit in near-catatonic depression over his laptop or pace his apartment in a strange restlessness, trying to make up his mind where to go, how to break out of his slump finally.
Sometimes he actually did go out in the evenings, the cooling air washing over him with its excitement; sometimes he actually did drive out of the parking lot onto the long, new parkway where light-poles were stacked by the road, and where the hillsides were brown and tracked over with the digging for new town-house complexes and shopping centers. But where to go? A singles bar? The idea both repelled and tantalized him. He holding a drink and sliding through air-conditioned dimness toward a half-seen hairdo in the smoke, which would probably conceal a drunk dental hygienist or secretary who, smelling his fear and uncertainty, would sneer him away in her stupid vocabulary and bad grammar. He didn't know where any singles bars were, and anyway even if he managed to pick someone up he would have nowhere to take her but his ssmelly, disheveled apartment. He should turn the car around, go back and tidy the place up first.
But it would take days to tidy up, unpack, wash the dishes, vacuum. He would put off the singles bar until he could get his life a little more in order.
And so he would drive around, livid glare of the streetlights making the pavement, sidewalks, grass, and trees a uniform greyish-green, looking for—he wasn't sure what. Even if a carful of careless, vapid, laughing blonde college girls careened to a stop next to him at a light, stereo booming, to them he would be just some grim, frowzy, middle-aged mommy-hubby who ought to go home to his bulging, gravity-defeated wife or rubber love-doll.
And so he would go home, not to a wife or even a love-doll, but to his TV, which he would watch in stupefaction until a prickling in his eyes and a sagging in his body told him it was too late to be awake, and then he would weakly brush his teeth and roll into bed. But in an hour he would start awake, heart pounding, hands sweating, the panic and sorrow of the divorce shaking him, as if revealed in all its horrible mistaken stupidity, the throwing away of his family, his whole life. Then he would lie, body stiff and hurting with rage and grief like chemical substances injected into him, and sleep would be impossible for hours.
#
The phone rang, a vigorous electric trill. The sound sent vague tendrils of anxiety and hope through Wayne. This was the beginning of a new life. He propped himself on an elbow in his bed and fumbled for the handset balanced on a cardboard box. "Hello?"
“Is this Wayne Dolan, novelist extraordinaire?” asked a deep, humorous New York/Mississippi drawl.
“No.”
The drawl chuckled. "Well, is this Wayne Dolan, who has thus far deprived his avid public of any hint as to the substance of his sixth and finest book?"
"How are you, Tom?"
“How are you yourself? You don’t sound like your normal sparky self.”
"Just woke up."
"Aw, come on now. It's almost one o'clock. I guess you were up late last night working on the outline for book number six?"
"No," Wayne admitted.
"Well, now, we've got to talk about this."
"I'm still kind of getting moved into the new apartment."
"I hear you. And I'm awfully sorry about you and Ann, I've told you that. I hate to bother you about it, you know I do. But Iry is getting worried, and when Iry gets worried, I get worried." Iry Feingold was Astrid Books' Executive Editor.
"Fuck Irv."
"I don't go that way. And if I did, I wouldn't try it on Irv." There was an apologetic pause. "You got writer's block, huh?"
"No."
"Leave all to father," Tom said broadly, as if he hadn't heard Wayne's denial. "I got an idea for you's going to make you scream with ecstasy."
Wayne's bowels drew into themselves. He listened stonily.
"You've heard of Tracy Kidder, right, and James Glieck, Mitchell Waldrop, Kitty Ferguson? All those best-selling auteurs who make millions not thinking up their own ideas—uh-uh, that's too hard. What they do is go find some far-out, hard-to-believe, real-world science and describe it with some vivid analogies and colorful characters, and then they go to the bank and take their satisfied editors and executive editors along with them. Am I right?"
"Tom, I'm a science fiction writer," said Wayne tightly. "Fiction. I don't do science journalism."
"Now just wait a little minute until you let the fullness of my genius flow over you," said Tom. " Have you ever heard of the Deriwelle Institute for the Technological Study of Religion?"
"The what?"
"That's just what I said. Turns out this screwy schmillionaire from the Bible Belt died a while back and left an x-hundred-million-dollar trust to fund an institute for the study of religion using electronic technology."
"Jesus."
"Only in America. It's been up and running a few years now, and nobody's paid any attention outside a couple little magazine articles. Can you believe that? They have the latest equipment, pay outrageous salaries, even have a couple Nobel laureates on staff—it's a piece of postmodern, millennial, apocalyptico-fundamentalist techno-Americana, and nobody has thought to go down there and write the thing up."
#
The Deriwelle Institute for the Technological Study of Religion was in an out-of-the-way part of an obscure region called Southwestern Michigan, far from any cities or other landmarks, where Wayne's AAA Road Atlas showed no thick red or blue lines, nor even any thin white lines, but only some thin black lines representing county routes. It was a two-day drive from the Mid-Atlantic Region, and on the second day, turning his old Honda north off the thick blue line of Interstate 90 at South Bend, Indiana, he followed County Route 31 past strip malls and car dealerships until these petered out into sooty warehouses with broken windows, barbed-wired tractor-trailer lots, and deserted gas stations, and then small frame houses with dirt yards and car seats on their porches. After that the land opened into gently rolling cornfields green and shoulder-high in the cloudless July afternoon, orchards with fruit stands displaying melons and tomatoes, far-off woods dark green and still in the sunlight. At intervals the highway slowed to 25 mph and passed through miniature towns built 150 years ago along the St. Clair River, with historic red brick firehouses, antique homes shaded by huge oaks, and tiny shopping centers. Sometimes the road ran close to the St. Clair, giving him glimpses through the trees of its murky green and shaded waters, like some river out of Middle-Earth or Huckleberry Finn. The map said it ran into Lake Michigan at the town of St. Clair, which in its heyday had been a port for the shipping of iron ore and a summer resort for rich people from Chicago.
The air through Wayne's wide-open car windows smelled alternately of plowed earth, woods, and hot blacktop. He was driving between rolling fields where a slow distant tractor moved patiently against a far backdrop of trees when he felt the air change. It was subtle but unmistakable, the far-off sense of a large body of water, perhaps a front of the healthful negative ions that blow off lakes and oceans. It entered him as an emotion more than a smell or sensation, bringing back for the first time in years, with sudden clarity—like a memory that had been packed carefully for frequent inspection, but then forgotten—his childhood summers at the ocean, relaxed, lazy, yet underlain by a vague excitement, as if anything might happen.
Soon the speed limit subsided once more to 25 and the county highway became a main street through quiet Victorian neighborhoods with great old trees nearly motionless in the crystalline sunlight. On a high front porch with an American flag an old pear-shaped man in suspenders rocked and watched the few passing cars. Now Wayne could actually smell the lake in snatches, like a layer of nearly unconscious excitement, subtly keen and cool even in the hot air, subliminally damp and fresh and grey-green, as though the hot, still afternoon were charged with a hint of fresh sea gales and the dangerous cries of mermaids.
St. Clair's small downtown had elderly storefronts canopied and ornamented with stone- or ironwork, old-fashioned groceries in red brick buildings with parking lots around back. The Holiday Inn stood across from a small park at the corner of a hundred-foot bluff above the mouth of the St. Clair River. Wayne put his suitcases in his room and went out there. A corny Civil War statue looked out over five blocks of summer-house neighborhoods on the lowland at the bottom of the bluff, and beyond them was the Lake, vast, sparkling restlessly chill pale blue, stretching beyond sight into bluish-grey haze like an ocean, a half-world of water overwhelming the land with its vast, vertiginous atmosphere, which made the temperature under the park's old leaning trees tropical-paradise cool and gave the town a smell and feel as if it did not exist anywhere on this earth, but rather in some story. Wayne stood and stared for a long time, feeling somehow that this great body of water, 60 miles wide and 150 miles long, knew him and had been waiting for him. Finally, he broke away and gazed up the St. Clair River. A hundred yards inland a soot-blackened railway bridge crossed it, and farther inland a road bridge. Gulls wheeled in the vast air above the river mouth, mewling. An old lady walked along the sidewalk across the street, slowly pulling a folding shopping cart.
He had had to admit in the end that he liked Tom Del Mar's idea—after he had soothed his ego by getting angry at being treated like some work-for-hire media-spinoff franchise hack. But Tom had figured out exactly what he needed, both spiritually and logistically, and had arranged everything. Wayne was to meet with the Deriwelle Institute administrators next morning, Torn having apparently persuaded them that nothing but enlarged public understanding could flow from Wayne's project.
So at 8:00 A.M. Wayne threaded his Honda through the narrow, waking streets of St. Clair, quiet at this hour, as if it had the luxury of sleeping late, the still air full of the dampness and smell of the Lake. He crossed the breathtaking span of the river bridge, and on the other side smelled woods and new-mown fields, rays of sunlight cutting across the county highway. Seven miles north he took a right on Institute Drive. There was half a mile of woods, and then he emerged into the Institute's grounds.
Institute Drive's brand-new, lamppost-flanked asphalt climbed in a graceful curve between vast lawns where a few ancient oaks and cedars arched gnarled branches nearly to the ground. Several sprawling three-story buildings were surrounded by shrubs and flower beds. Away to his right two pillared, domed structures like Classical-style observatories sat on hills landscaped like English Romantic wild gardens. Sunlight made green brilliance of the forest treetops, and was just beginning to fire the flower beds and dewy grass. The whole place exuded affluence, like a particularly businesslike country club.
The Administration Building entrance was a heavy plate-glass door of watery green. Within was a high atrium with trees in huge pots, walled and ceilinged with the same glass; morning sunlight made a bright shaft on expensive-looking Oriental carpets in faded red motifs. A reception booth contained a confection of long brown fingernails, auburn hair, and green eyes, as if she had been picked to match the decor. Wayne was acutely aware of his own jeans, T-shirt, and slightly sweaty sports jacket. He mumbled that he had an appointment with Dr. Rilfsbane, and she spoke into a headset.
Dr. Alan Rilfsbane, when he came down the open staircase at the back of the atrium in a dark double-breasted suit, shiny black loafers, and silver cuff links, looked more like a symphony conductor or the maitre d' of an exclusive restaurant than the administrator of a scientific foundation. He was big and handsome, with a high, aristocratic forehead and intelligent, beautifully formed hands. His black hair was carelessly ducktailed in back like a college professor's or a sporting British lord's. He came forward heartily to give Wayne a firm handshake, but there was also something lithe and watchful about him.
"Mr. Dolan," he said in a soft, deep voice. "How nice to meet you."He gestured gracefully toward the stairs.
"We are naturally flattered to have attracted the interest of so accomplished a writer," he said as they climbed. "Mr. Del Mar tells me you're the author of some half dozen critically acclaimed books."
"Five," said Wayne reflexively. "And critically acclaimed and a dollar'll get you a cup of coffee."
Rilfsbane laughed, rearing back his head in approval. "I thought we would go directly up to the office of Dr. Florisbund, the Institute's Director. I assume you have heard of him? The pioneering neurobiology researcher?" He held another heavy glass door on the mezzanine between elaborate, glass-walled conference rooms, led Wayne down a pearl-white hallway with doors on either side. Through those that were open Wayne saw spacious, well-appointed offices, some neat, some messy, occupied by persons in various stages of reading, writing, or staring out the window. At the top of another flight was an even more silent hallway, flooded with sun from skylights, with precious-looking vases on wooden stands and a rusty Oriental runner. Rilfsbane ushered Wayne through a door at the end. An ancient secretary whose brocade dress and golden hairdo sat on her like armor gestured toward an inner door. Wayne followed Rilfsbane in.
An old, sunken man sat behind a desk in a big, sunny office with windows that looked out over the Institute grounds as over Paradise. As Rilfsbane and Wayne came in he was holding a paper in a quavering hand, as if trying to remember which of the piles in front of him it belonged to. He looked up at them with dazed, intelligent, rheumy eyes. Wattles of flesh hung at his neck, and the grey hair on his narrow head stood up stiffly.
"Ah, Dr. Rilfsbane," he said in a wavering voice. He looked politely at Wayne.
"Dr. Florisbund," said Rilfsbane cordially. "May I introduce Mr. Wayne Dolan."
Dr. Florisbund now rose slowly and shakily, helping himself with a hand on the top of the desk and another on the arm of his chair. Once he was all the way erect he held a Parkinsonian hand behind a large, veined ear and looked at Wayne again. There was a hearing aid in the ear.
"Mr. Wayne Dolan," Rilfsbane said again loudly.
"Ah, Mr. Boyland, welcome," said Florisbund. Wayne shook a cool, bony, trembling hand.
"Please, sit," said Dr. Florisbund, lowering himself slowly and painfully into his chair again, until he dropped the last few inches with a deep sigh. Wayne and Rilfsbane took two comfortable armchairs. Rilfsbane's cordial, smiling expression had been on his face long enough to look slightly phony by the time Dr. Florisbund had settled himself. He said, loudly: "Mr. Dolan is a well-known writer who is working on a book about the Institute."
The rheumy, intelligent eyes surveyed Wayne. Then his slow, wavering voice said: "Mr. Boyland, welcome. I suppose Dr. Rilfsbane has explained the philosophy and mission of the Institute?"
"We haven't had time," Rilfsbane said loudly. "I brought him directly to you."
"Ah," said the old man. He tremblingly opened a drawer and scrabbled in it, came up with a three-color brochure, which he unfolded clumsily. He put on a pair of thick reading glasses.
Wayne could feel the muscles of his own face strained from keeping a look of earnest attention. He wondered if his edginess was a result of 21st-century short attention span, or whether it had always been this tedious listening to the wisdom of elders.
“Mr. Deriwelle observed in his bequest to the Institute—" Dr. Florisbund read slowly and waveringly from the brochure "—that 'the wonderful potentialities of Electricity, which have accomplished so many marvels in the areas of Commerce, Science, and Domestic Life, have inexplicably never been put to service in the study of Religion. It is my fervent belief that the Electrical Study of Religion could illuminate many of the dark recesses of this most important Matter, throwing light upon questions heretofore the subjects only of Dry Speculation and Fruitless Metaphysical Debate. I therefore devise my entire estate [with the exception of reservations mentioned elsewhere in the will for the support of certain distant relatives of Mr. Deriwelle's] to the exclusive and perpetual establishment of an Institute for the Electrical Study of Religion.'"
"The Electrical Study of Religion," said Wayne.
"The Institute's Board of Directors has interpreted the phrase in the sense in which Mr. Deriwelle obviously meant it," Rilfsbane said, glancing at Florisbund. "As `the use of modern technology in the study of religion.'"
"So you're using modern technology to try to prove the existence of God?"
"Our forty Senior Research Fellows come from every shade of the spectrum of religious belief. Some are dedicated atheists, others devout believers, with every gradation in between."
"Where do the two Nobel winners come out?"
Rilfsbane smiled urbanely. "I believe they 'come out,' as you put it, in different ways. But I hope you will avail yourself of the opportunity to speak with them personally, and to observe their experimental and theoretical methods."
Dr. Florisbund nodded approvingly, though Wayne wasn't sure how much of this he had heard, and went on in his courtly, old-world way. "My point is, in a culture where we study everything to death scientifically, even the smallest item, nowhere in our intellectual landscape until the establishment of the Deriwelle Institute for the Technological Study of Religion has there been a single institution dedicated to studying what is after all the thing that concerns us most closely."
Both Rilfsbane and Florisbund were smiling at him now, as if they had gotten him on their team and were just awaiting the flood of questions he would certainly have.
"So, how did you decide to set up in this part of the country?" he asked obligingly.
"That was part of Mr. Deriwelle's will as well," said Rilfsbane. "In addition to the groundbreaking research undertaken here, Mr. Deriwelle's bequest has also accomplished a significant work of historical preservation. The Institute campus and the surrounding areas owned by the Institute are part of sacred medicine land used until early in the last century by the Blue Water tribe of Native Americans, a people now completely extinct."
Florisbund scrabbled in his drawer and held waveringly across the desk a blurry three-color brochure titled "The Blue Water State Historical Preserve," which looked like it had been published by some local society.
Wayne put it in his jacket pocket, and then as he paused to formulate his next question his eyes went to the pearl-white wall above Dr. Florisbund's head. A portrait hung there in an ornate frame with a brass plaque that said "Percival Deriwelle." It was a photograph, actually—a black-and-white full-bust close-up, as if to show Percival Deriwelle in the same light as the railroad and banking barons of the 19th century. At first glance he certainly seemed of a piece with them, with his old, hard face, white hair, and wire-rimmed glasses, but on longer inspection there was something slightly wrong with the face—the eyes seemed cocked off in different directions, the jaw clenched unevenly so that one side bulged out; there was a hint of dishevelment in the hair, even a hint of uncleanliness about the skin.
Staring at the photograph, Wayne could feel the Deriwelle Institute for the Technological Study of Religion falling to pieces around him, the Oriental carpets and dolly receptionist, the plate glass and manicured flower beds, the mission statements and scientific credentials all crashing into a heap, the spell he now realized the place had begun to cast over him broken. All of it had simply been bought, with lots of money supplied by the lunatic in the picture, a cross between Andrew Carnegie, Scrooge McDuck, and Charles Manson. Wayne wondered whether Deriwelle had mandated that this particular picture be hung in the Institute, or whether it was just the best picture of him they had.
"Of course there are those who believe that Mr. Deriwelle was an eccentric," Rilfsbane said.
Wayne looked down at him, feeling slightly sick.
Florisbund still wore an oblivious, courtly politeness, but Rilfsbane was watching Wayne with a complicated look, part smooth assurance, part caution, part an almost haunted crestfallenness; it occurred to Wayne that this wasn't the first time he had seen the picture of the Institute's obviously bug-fuck founder throw someone who had just been buoyed by the sheer moneyed beauty of the place into half-believing there must be something to it. He guessed that the Institute must have to put up with a lot of ridicule, even beyond the few articles he had read.
"Yet the Institute's particular brand of open-minded and free-spirited research has attracted some of the finest scientists of our generation," Rilfsbane was saying. "Frankly, we are hoping that an objective, unbiased examination of our work will help dispel mischaracterizations by persons unfamiliar with the Institute."
Wayne was getting over the shock of Deriwelle's picture, steeled by the cynicism that protects modern people against disappointment in spiritual things. After all, the crazier the better, right? A posh pseudo-science institute built on sacred Indian land by a multimillionaire fruitcake? Great, if you were writing a book about it. "Well, I have to admit that what I've heard so far is fascinating," he said, and it was his turn to be urbane. "We science fiction people pride ourselves on our refusal to blindly accept prevailing orthodoxies. Needless to say, I hope I'll be able to do you justice."
On the way downstairs, Wayne said to Rilfsbane: "I was hoping to find a sublet or summer cottage or something like that, not too expensive and not too far from the Institute. Can you make any suggestions about where I might look?”