The Postmortal (25 page)

I made a promise to David to go to a collectivist service and to do so with an open mind. Last night I tried sleeping but could only hear the phantom whispers of oncoming vagrants outside my window. I leapt to the sill a handful of times, gun in hand, and saw nothing. My body settled into a locked state of unease. My visit to a religious congregation couldn’t have come at a better time.

I drove the plug-in from my apartment down Old Dominion Road until I saw the stretch of Church of Man congregation houses that served the various ethnic needs of the town—the Korean COM, the Chinese COM, the Spanish COM. Each had a welcoming sign posted outside the fortified double walls of its compound (I learned later on that a series of underground tunnels connects them all). At the end of this de facto Collectivist Alley was the town’s Community Friends church, which offers services in English. It was the closest English-speaking COM, so it was the one I picked. I arrived early, to beat the morning rush, but there was still a line to get in, all waiting plug-ins redirected by a traffic cop to the shoulder of Old Dominion. I waited a scant twenty minutes before reaching the gate and being greeted warmly by a church volunteer, a smiley fellow named Jack, who wore basic khakis and a denim shirt and asked for my church ID.

“I don’t have one,” I explained. “This is my first visit.”

He was unfazed. “Oh, no problem! I can register you. All I need is your name and an e-mail or feed address.”

“Can I just give you my name? I’d rather not disclose the other stuff.”

He smiled the way restaurant hostesses do when they tell you all members of your party need to be present for you to be seated. Somehow the smiling makes it more aggravating. “Unfortunately, we
do
need an e-mail or feed address.” I gave him Matt’s. He stole my lunch out of the fridge last week, so I owed him one.

“And what is your occupation?” Jack asked.

“I’m a solutions consultant.”

“That sounds interesting!”

“It isn’t.”

“Okay! Go right on in. Please do not park on levels P1 to P5. Those are reserved for our Superfriend donors. May the world of man bless and keep you!”

I drove through the gate and was confronted by a large California-style villa. White stucco. Red adobe-tile roof. The church was arranged as a quad, with buildings at each corner and open walkways between them. In the center of the quad was a pristine green lawn, not a single blade of grass touching another. I saw families eating breakfast on blankets and circles of young (looking) people reading intently. It looked like Stanford. I’ve never been to Stanford. I just assume that’s what it looks like.

I went down into the garage and parked at level P8. I got into the elevator, and a short, bald gentleman wearing khaki pants and a denim shirt rushed in behind me. He wore a bracelet that said JESUS IS US. The doors closed behind us, and as the elevator stopped at each successive level, more and more church members mashed into the car, pushing me and my original companion to the back. Some of them were clad in the same khakis-and-denim-shirt ensemble. All of them—women, men, kids—made a point of greeting the man next to me as they entered the car. They addressed him as “Reverend.” He seemed to be important. At one point during the ascent, he took notice of me.

“You look unfamiliar,” he said. “I deliberately park on the lower levels, to see if any new people pull in alongside me.”

“I am new. My son asked me to attend a service, so I figured today was as good a day as any.”

“Well, that’s lovely. My name is Carl Derron, I’m the reverend of this congregation.”

“John Farrell.” We shook hands. “Carl, may I ask you a question? Or is it Reverend Derron?”

“Carl is fine. Ask me lots of questions.”

“My son wears the same outfit you have on now. Is there a certain meaning behind it?”

He shut his eyes and nodded his head rapidly. “Very good question, very good. John, church members are allowed to wear anything they wish. That’s fine with us. We accept each other any way we choose to present ourselves. But it is the belief of some, including myself, that ostentatious clothing and tattoos and piercings and all those other things tend to dilute a person’s purity and the connection they have with those around them. These clothes are, frankly, boring. And they’re that way because I don’t want them distracting people from who I am—from the essence of me. That’s why you see the COM nudist colonies from time to time. That’s taking it a bit too far for my tastes. Then people get distracted for a whole other reason.”

“Do you wear this all the time?”

“Not when the Skins play, my friend. Not when the Skins play.”

The doors opened and we walked out into the main chapel, which looked like the giant study of some very rich man’s house. Books lined the walls on all sides, stacked to the rafters. Dozens of library ladders were placed on a rolling track around the stacks, with many congregants using them for makeshift seating. Stained-glass windows depicted various historical events: Ben Franklin flying a kite with a key attached in a thunderstorm, D-day in Normandy, Neil Armstrong on the moon, Graham Otto with his fruit flies, etc. A handful of folding chairs were placed at the front of the room for the perma-elderly and handicapped. Everyone else stood. It was like a giant cocktail party. Everyone was busy talking to everyone else, and the din rose to the ceiling and bounced harshly back down. People came en masse to introduce themselves to me, but I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. I just smiled and shouted out my personal details as best I could.

I saw Derron make his way through the crowd, shaking hands and giving babies raspberries on their tummies before finally making his way to a small stage. All I could see was the sheen off his bare scalp. I could make out part of a band sitting behind the reverend. He raised his hand, and the band began playing. They played “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The Joe Cocker arrangement. Half the crowd danced, while the others just kept shouting over the party. I was passed a stapled printout listing the day’s readings and songs. I flipped through it to make an educated guess about how long the service would last. The song finished ; then Derron raised his hand once more and began speaking to the now morgue-quiet room.

“Good morning,” he said.

The entire congregation replied in unison. “Good morning!”

“I was going to speak to you today about my usual boring stuff, like being good to your fellow man and knowing your COM history book inside and out. But instead I want to talk to you about . . . flying.”

The crowd tittered.

“I was looking into flights to go see my granddaughter in Nevada this fall. I don’t know why I looked, given that I already knew I couldn’t afford the ticket. But I looked anyway, just for sport. The total round-trip ticket—not including baggage fees, of course—was $12,230.”

The crowd let out a proper gasp at the figure.

“Now, I knew I couldn’t pay for that ticket unless I were the sort to be rather loose with church collection. So I was despondent, because I knew I’d have to make that endless drive in the plug-in. Then I saw something that made me even more despondent. It was an article—I’m sure you saw it as well—about the plane that crashed earlier this week. This airplane was a long-awaited prototype. The first battery-powered electric passenger jet: the VoltAir 717. And it crashed on its maiden voyage, killing two people: the pilot, named Wyatt Embry, and the company CEO, named Sir David Paul Furniss. Now the article said that one year earlier Furniss’s beta version of the prototype had successfully lifted off the ground and remained airborne for fifteen minutes. But the new version was said to be able to fly on electric power for a full hour, good enough for a short regional commute. So Furniss assembled a press conference and declared the VA717 ‘ready for takeoff.’ He even had a nickname picked out for the plane: the
Crimson Wasp
, which is very catchy. And the plane had all kinds of fancy features inside—interior designed by Layla DiGiorno, panoramic Lucite windows, showers, and a buffet restaurant in the main cabin. The whole shebang. So this was a big deal. And what happened was this: Embry and Furniss climbed into the plane and taxied down the runway in front of a grandstand containing what was said to be more than three hundred family members, company employees, and spectators. Next—let me just read from the article: ‘Witnesses report that the plane lifted off the ground and began sinking back to the ground shortly afterward, crashing into a nearby orchard.’ Now, this is tragic on a number of levels. Obviously, two men died and their loved ones have been left bereft. And our hopes for a more ecofriendly and cheaper form of air travel, one that would presumably one day make the trip to see my granddaughter more affordable, were delivered a big setback. I think, despite our quibbles with the flying process, most of us would give anything to be able to fly regularly again. Do we all agree?”

Everyone nodded.

“So I was sad, because I hate to see progress derailed. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought there was a lesson to be learned in all this. A wonderful lesson. Here we have two men, Furniss and Embry, who gave their lives to an idea that would, in turn, better the lives of each and every one of us in the postmortal world. They gave everything for the chance to help us. Why? Money? Well, sure. The desire to be known as aviation pioneers? Of course. Ambition plays a role. But that ambition is a gift—something inherent in man that drives him to help society and technology evolve in ways that are
always
better than what came before. Don’t you see how amazing this is? This is a blessing
all
of us have. So even though this news is tragic, I am uplifted. They interviewed a man named Juan Ozuma, VoltAir’s vice president. And this is what Ozuma said in the wake of the crash: ‘I assure you that we remain determined to see the mission of this company through.’ Is his company going to give up because these two men died? No! They’re going to keep going. They’re going to fight in the face of tragedy to realize the dream of electric air travel. And you know what? I bet they’ll succeed. Maybe not now. Definitely not now. But somewhere down the line, someone will figure it out. Because someone always does. History proves this time and time again. Discoveries are made. Walls are torn down.”

I listened intently, and everything Derron said seemed rational. But then I saw his scalp crinkle, the tops of his eyebrows bobbing up and down over the head of the blond fellow standing in front of me, and the sermon took a turn.

“This is divinity, people. This is what we talk about when we talk about the collective—this massive, unstoppable life force that is the progress of man. This is the blessing we have bestowed upon the earth. Other congregations may tiptoe around this idea, but I do not. We are the gods of this world. Make no mistake. An ant—a little, tiny ant walking on the ground—that ant looks up at you or me, and what does he see? A titan. A higher power he cannot even begin to comprehend. One that has absolute control over his destiny. We are fate. And the death of these two wonderful, innovative men does not change that a lick. When you go home today, I want you to think about your ambition and the awesome power you have over this earth and the creatures that reside upon it. For they are yours. I want you to—”

Just then, a heckler began shouting from somewhere in the crowd. I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear him screaming at Derron from the center of the chapel floor. “You are a fucking abomination!” he said. “You are a fucking abomination, Reverend Carl Derron! This whole fucking church is going to crash and burn soon, and I will see to it! RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”

The entire crowd gasped, and I found myself in the midst of a struggle as panicked churchgoers fled for the exits. Through the escaping bodies, I saw a team of men holding down the heckler, and just the quickest glint of metal somewhere in the heap. A knife, a gun, a cane—I don’t know. All I saw was the shine. I quickly turned and headed for the doors, as security officers in riot gear stormed through. Derron’s voice reassured the crowd that the heckler had been subdued. I felt no such reassurance and quickly left the Church of Man, mind closed shut.

While waiting to leave the garage, I pinged David to tell him about the service. I described the creepy way Derron had concluded his preaching and what the presumed assassin had done. He said I’d simply picked the wrong church. He implored me to seek out a different congregation and try again. I promised nothing.

This is transcribed from Joe Mascis’s CBSNN report yesterday on RMUs: