Letter- Jenica

Excerpt from The Silver Man

The most unexpected thing happened today, and as soon as it did, I knew that I had to write to you. 
 

Specifically, Jamie McCall (Mr. McCall) skipped breakfast with the Family this morning. In all the time I’ve been here, I don’t know if I can remember a time that he did that. That alone I thought was odd, but what was even more strange was the fact that Tricia Feaney was at breakfast while Mr. McCall sat it out. And that she (Tricia) sat in Mr. McCall’s seat. I’ll remind you that he hangs some importance on his chair and the fact that only he is permitted to sit in it. 
 

Seeing Tricia sitting in his place like that was such a wild scene that I had to leave breakfast and head for the meeting hall, where I knew Harriett and Elizabeth would be waiting for me to unpack the supremely off-putting image of Tricia, sitting in the priest’s throne, smiling to the rest of the Family and eating the foods that Mr. McCall and the other interpreters get to eat at their table on the barn side of the eight-table configuration on the property. (I’m giving you these details because the arrangement of the tables has changed since you visited here last, and I want you to imagine the scene as I describe it to you.) 
 

There’s the big table, as you know, which was—when you were here—under the maple when the weather was good and really under the maple when the weather was bad. And that’s now directly under the barn. You know the one: there’s a faded metal sculpture of a rooster hanging above the barn doors. 
 

So, Mr. McCall and the high priests (Elizabeth has been calling that group the ‘inner circle,’ which I rather like, and I think is an appropriate descriptor) now face the maple, which Mr. McCall explained on account of the fact that it was actually easier for him to read the Will when it was seen from some distance. He explained to Elizabeth that the Will sometimes takes the form of great droplets of this honey-looking, diaphanous medium, which descend from some source well beyond the clouds and crystallize on the leaves of the maple, where they can be interpreted once the crystallization process is complete.

The way Elizabeth explains it, the inner circle must (I mean, they must) live in their whole little world, removed from the plane of familiar existence that you and I inhabit simply because they can see more than we can, and the world they see is infinitely more sublime and ethereal than the world we live in, interact with, and conceive of as “the world.” And I like the idea of that; I admire the notion that there is some sort of divinely-supported parallel universe which some human beings (the select few that have been granted that gift, of course) can see and live in and interact with. 

I was laying down on the slope leading away from the alfalfa plot with Harriett one afternoon recently, and she asked me, ‘Jenica, is there one thing in the world you want more than anything else?’ And at first, I debated with her respecting whether or not I could, under the rules of her hypothetical, say a category of things or a single object, and we agreed that I could say a category of things, but that specific people were excluded from the set of things that I could want. So, with the ground rules of the hypothetical question she posed to me all set as I just explained to you, I began to formulate an answer. And I really thought it through. I initially said that I want what everyone wants: domestic bliss after some amount of time experiencing what non-family life can offer.

But then I realized that I don’t actually want what other people want. In fact, I want quite the opposite. I want what almost no one has; more specifically, I want that gift that makes Mr. McCall the great man he is, and I want the respect and adulation that his gift (and his possession thereof) inspires from the Family. And more than that, I need to know what profound revelations seem to underlie the dimly smiling face of Mr. McCall, who walks around as though he has all the answers to life’s questions.

Did you know (and I must have told you, but whether or not I have, it bears repeating) that I once saw him sit down and teach himself the guitar? Just like that: Just teach it to himself. It went like this:

So, me, Jonah, and Elizabeth were sitting in the community room, listening to some cool jazz cats unpack the influences of Herbie Hancock and Charles Mingus—you wouldn’t think it, but Miles Davis is on record as saying that Mingus was influenced by Brubeck, if you can believe it (Elizabeth could not, and she told us as much). Jonah was passing around a freshly packed duBois for our communal enjoyment, and the night was just beginning. (And, as it so often does, it was beginning the same way: with weed and music.)

But then Mr. McCall came in, smiled at us, and sat between me and Jonah, his arms (conspicuously, I thought, but I’m very sensitive to physical touch, as you know) around both of our shoulders. He smelled like that kind of Canadian tobacco he is particularly fond of, but he also had a distinctly female scent about him. I remember that because I made eye contact with Elizabeth from across the couch when he sat down, and I knew that she was thinking the same thing I was. (We had our suspects: Grace and Iris were the initial front-runners, but now we tend to think Tricia.)

Anyway, he comes down, and at first it seems like he’s going to be perfectly content just to listen to the radio with us. So, we listen for a while, and I notice that I’m quieter than I normally am—perhaps inspired by the subconscious desire to share only thoughts which color me as a particularly insightful and intelligent person in front of Mr. McCall (rather than babble like I usually do, and fill the silences with my normal, insipid chatter). Elizabeth was quieter, too, but she also was touching her hair more than usual, and I’m not sure about this, but it looked to me as though she were sucking in her cheeks to give her face a more tapered and defined look. 

I don’t even really think that Elizabeth has the hots for Mr. McCall is the thing. I think she just wanted to be taken more seriously or inspire lust in him for some reason that was, and still is, not at all clear to me. In any event, I decided to ask her about it when Mr. McCall left, but I forgot to, so I can’t give you anything further on that account.

Jonah reacted differently to Mr. McCall’s being there, and (as you might guess) he fell into that Jonah persona that he often falls into: Mr. McCall’s go-to pseudo-intellectual, high-minded, apple-polishing toady. It really is fascinating to me that Mr. McCall sees only that side of Jonah and seems to be okay with that. If I were to speak my truth, I really fucking hate that side of Jonah, and I would want nothing to do with him if I was exposed only to the nervously attention-seeking sycophant Jonah. Thank God he is so relaxed when Mr. McCall isn't around, or I would really take issue with him, especially now that he’s living on oak wing, which is directly adjacent to elm wing (and my floor), as you may or may not recall.

And but so Mr. McCall gets to bobbing his head, and we stay in that state of comfortable but oddly fraught silence, listening to the jazz cats babble to one another, when all of the sudden Mr. McCall sits up and looks worried. And then he stands up and dances this kind of weird shaky two-step, looking for something that he evidently lost but believed might be located in one of his two front pockets. And we watch him become increasingly concerned with whatever it was that he lost, and then he rushes—and I mean rushes—out of the room, as Jonah sort of meekly offers his services in helping him look for what was not in his pockets. 

And we think that’s the end of it, and the temperature of the night gets back to that familiar cool feeling of Jonah, Elizabeth, and I shooting the shit and spending time with the radio and the now third-of-the-night doobie, courtesy of Jonah. But then Mr. McCall comes back down, holding this great big guitar and a baby blue pick (which he then reveals was the object he had misplaced and which he had been looking for, earlier). I had never seen the guitar and I confirmed with Jonah and Elizabeth afterward that none of us had ever seen it before, and that we had certainly never chanced to see it near, or otherwise in connection with, Mr. McCall.

And then he starts playing, and it quickly becomes clear to all of us that the guitar and Mr. McCall had never interacted with one another before, because Jonah has to go and like physically move his arms and hands to the proper positions, and then show him the very basic chords. He (Mr. McCall) had brought down a chord book with him, but the notations—the little symbols for extensions, suspensions, augmentations, and diminutions—were utterly meaningless to him without a good two hours of Jonah’s careful instruction. And you had best believe that Jonah was being his most obsequious self: complimenting the emittance of any sound, no matter how off key. He would patiently manipulate the finger positions of Mr. McCall and then praise him for holding his fingers in the exact same positions in which Jonah had set them. (Jonah would praise him for just not moving them!)

After a while (it must have been three in the morning by then), Jonah goes off to bed, as he had begun to slide into the couch and his obsequious reinforcement of Mr. McCall’s progressively more adept playing had begun to sound more and more tired and insincere. 

So now in the community room, there’s only Mr. McCall, who shows no signs of tiring, and Elizabeth and I, who know nothing about music aside from being able to bob our head in time, and we silently agree with each other to commence some sort of dancing brinkmanship. Elizabeth would bob her head, and I would dip mine, adding a kind of convoluted shoulder shimmy as a flourish. Elizabeth would then mirror the same movements, adding more complex motions as Mr. McCall played on. At five in the morning, he was strumming ‘The Final Countdown,’ which he had been concentratedly working on between the hours of two thirty and four thirty, and Elizabeth and I were standing in the dimly-lit (there’s only the one lamp, which always seems to attract this weirdly speckled species of moth which I never seem to see except for right next to that lamp) community room, spazzing out and making little dance patterns, confining our movements, though, to our own self-made circles.

I went to bed before Elizabeth, after Jimmy and the twins and that newcomer I mentioned to you in my last letter, Sandy or Sandra (I forgot how she introduced herself to me, and I have been too embarrassed to go up to her and ask her again), had gotten up to start their day and had been shocked to find the three of us in the community room, exhausted but still dancing and playing. I went to bed to the muffled but still audible sounds of strumming, and I woke up some six hours later to the same. When I woke up, the prior night’s events were hazy to me, but my first thought was ‘what pretty music, I wonder who knows how to play like that?’ Then I remembered, and I was shocked to realize it was Mr. McCall, who had somehow climbed every single rung of guitar-playing competence in the course of one night.

And yes, that story was apropos of nothing, but I firmly believe that Mr. McCall was able to learn the instrument as quickly as he was able to because of his relationship to the Will, as convoluted and contradictory as it sounds. And I want that: yes, that’s why I was recalling the night with Mr. McCall and the guitar, because his single-minded determination and focus seemed almost otherworldly, and (I believe) it was vested in him precisely by something otherworldly. Isn’t that just a fantastic thought? I think so, anyway. 

I imagine you’re interested in what the Will has been saying of late, so I won’t mince my words in that regard—especially since you’ve already indulged me in relating the above story. I take notes every day and I’ll summarize the most salient points: The Will, aside from generally extolling the virtues of world peace and global community (tired and cliched virtues for a sublime being to be extolling, day after day, in my opinion), it sounds as though there will be more immediate hardships in store for the Family. While the fact that we are the chosen people has been affirmed by the Will—or rather by Mr. McCall on behalf of the Will—it sadly does not mean that life will be easy for us before the world ultimately ends. 
Rather, it means, to ground the abstraction in example, that we will have to shell out even more money for the community fund, and we’ll have to sell even more bud than we have been. Personally, I don’t know how we’ll be able to do that. We’re remote enough that there’s no one around to sell to, and if we coordinate rides into the cities, then suddenly it becomes a multi-day affair, there’s more risk of being caught by those fascist San Fran (or San Jose, or Oakland, or wherever we decide we want to sell) pigs, and our expenses rise in rough proportion to the distance from the farm that we travel. But I don’t mind all of that. You and Luca are so loaded it’s ridiculous, and I know you’re supportive of what we’ve been doing (and you’ll show that support by financially supporting me viz., my share of the contribution to the fund), so I’m not worried about my end of things. The same, sadly, cannot be said for Elizabeth, who left her life with very little money and has naturally not gained money while living with the Family.

While this assessment of things by the Will is new, it seems to fit within a theme of similar premonitions—or worldly pronouncements, assessments, divine ordinances, or what have you—that the Will has been bestowing on Mr. McCall, since more or less the time that Tricia started emerging as the clear second-best Will interpreter in the Family. 

Everyone agrees that she is now: Her position was solidified when she was given the chair next to Mr. McCall, which is ordinarily left empty. Then, a week later, much to the puzzlement of Jonah in particular (who thought that someone else might be tapped for the now empty chair and was hoping that “someone else” might be him), the chair was gone, to be replaced several days later by a more permanent fixture for Tricia on the patio beneath the barn—the only other permanent seat of course belonging to Mr. McCall. 

It’s sad when people start to question the very ideas central to the idea of the Family; namely, that the Will has ordained that this very group of people should live according to a new set of precepts fit for a new age. Such precepts are passed down through the previously described process of luminescent precipitation, which (the precipitation) is then interpreted by the Family priests. It’s always been unclear to me how the priests interpret it, but I know such interpretation hinges on the crystallization process, which fixes the then-fluid Will into solid, sensible, discrete, and interpretable pieces of meaning. Of course, within the class of ‘priests,’ there are degrees of skill and differences with respect to the priests’ abilities to divine the meaning of whatever substrate they are able to see. 

Mr. McCall is unquestionably in charge, but it is becoming increasingly clear that Tricia has been chosen by the Will, which choice is evidenced by her skill at Will parsing and interpretation. Mr. McCall has said as much to anyone who will listen. 

The attention she gets is enough to make me really despise her and make me question her suspicious ascendancy to her present position. 

Anyway, I miss you.

And I think, for the first time since coming here, that I might want to visit home. If I do, maybe you’ll be around? I’m not looking for a commitment either way, but I just wanted you to know that you could see me (you know, if you wanted to).

​

Your friend always,
Jenica