The gavel came down with a crack, which surprised me, because I thought that courts didn’t use real gavels anymore. I thought gavels were symbols of office, for decoration only, like a captain’s sextant or a priest’s bible. But there it was—a sharp stroke against the wooden desk that sounded in my head like a gunshot. Bang. My first criminal conviction. I had a record.
It was all a set-up of course. Anybody could see it. The judge was as much a part of the system as the rest of them. There were the cops who arrested me. There was the clerk who processed me when I went to the holding cell. There was the Justice of the Peace who set my bail. There was the Legal Aid clerk who handled my application for counsel. She was like all the others—working for the government and wheedling me for more information. And then there was my lawyer—collecting his fee from Legal Aid—in effect, working for the government too, even though he said he worked for me. They were all in it together. It was just a big set-up.
I got arrested for throwing egg bombs at the American consulate. Never heard of an egg bomb? I guess not, seeing as I invented it. When I was a kid, my mom would sit me and my brothers down at the kitchen table to make Easter eggs and we’d start by blowing out the eggs. That was how I’d start to make my egg bombs too. Blow them out. Then I’d seal up the hole in the bottom and pour in my ingredients—ammonium nitrate for one thing—and some other stuff that’s none of your business—nothing you couldn’t figure out from reading the Antichrist’s Cookbook. Then stick in a fuse and pack twelve of them up in a carton like a real dozen eggs and stuff them in the bottom of my knap sack.
What was I protesting? No. No. Not the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. And not the war in Iraq. It was something simpler, something personal. The CIA had hacked into my desktop computer and commandeered my web cam to spy on me. Even though my computer sits on the kitchen table, they were able to use my web cam to take video of me in my bedroom. Doing things. You know. Things of a personal nature. Yeah, I thought you’d ask that—how they could use a web cam to take video of something down the hall, around the corner and through another doorway. It’s all very complicated. Involves photon telemetry theory and light difractals. But it’s possible. I have a file—a dossier—of all the research. The people from Langley can do it.
Well I wasn’t going to stand for it. The CIA was violating my right to privacy and I wanted to send a clear message to those arrogant imperialists that they weren’t ever going to subject me to the humiliation of publicly showing video of me in my bedroom … You know. Doing what people do. In bedrooms.
With a woman? You think I should have a co-complainant? A second egg-lobber? A partner in crime? She—
Hand job? What? Throwing an egg? Oh! Oh. I see. You think all they caught me doing in my bedroom was—
You don’t think they caught me doing anything? Well now that’s just insulting. Of course they hacked into my computer. They leave digital traces you know. I have the proof. Well … I had the proof. Except my external hard drive failed the day before yesterday, which should come as no surprise, since they probably engineered that to happen too.
So there I was, down at the American consulate, lobbing my egg bombs at the windows. Didn’t work, as you can see from the fact that I wasn’t charged with detonating dangerous explosives, only leaving a black goo running down a couple windows and pooling on the sills, and gumming up the toes of a few pigeons. Bang! A criminal record, and a sentence too.
When it came time to make submissions for sentencing, the lawyer did his best to present me in a good light. He stood there in his thousand dollar suit and waved in my direction and smiled and told the judge how I’m really a nice guy, with a steady job as a clerk in a bookstore, who lives alone in a one bedroom apartment, who keeps mostly to himself and has never done anything like this before in his life. Yup. That’s me. A model citizen. Doing my best to stand up for the rights of the little guy.
When my lawyer was done talking, the judge announced that he had made up his mind. He told me to stand up, which I did. Then he glared down at me from that raised up desk of his and gave me a lecture about the importance of social order and respect for the law, how my intent (blowing things up) was grave and reprehensible, but my method (egg bombs) was innocuous enough that it mitigated the circumstances, as did the fact that I didn’t have a criminal record, not even a parking ticket. So the judge told me he wasn’t going to send me to prison. Instead, I’d have to do two hundred hours of community service. “You have a choice,” he said in that venerable voice of his. “You can either help out in an inner-city soup kitchen, or you can read to victims of aphasia.”
“What’s aphasia?” I asked.
“How the hell should I know? I’m just reading off a list.”
That’s how I ended up doing volunteer work at the Centre for Incurable Aphasia. On my first day, a middle-aged social worker named Glenda gave me a tour of the place and told me all about aphasia. She hobbled around on stumpy legs, introducing me to their in-house nurse and another social worker and some of the volunteers and a whole raft of gibbering yammering aphasics. She explained to me that aphasia has something to do with the language centres of the brain. Sometimes, when a person has a stroke or an accident or when a person gets Alzheimer’s disease, they lose the ability to understand speech or read text. Or they might lose the ability to speak coherently. For some of them, the things they say make sense within their own little world, but make complete nonsense to the rest of us. The other problem with aphasics is that they sometimes don’t know where they are, and even for those who do know where they are, things can sometimes get snipey. Suppose you’re an aphasic and you get lost? How are you gonna ask for directions? And even if you do get directions, what’s to say you’ll understand them? I could see right away that this could be a real problem for some people.
At the end of the tour, Glenda introduced me to Robert, only she pronounced it with a funny accent, like she was ordering a bear to row a boat: Row, bear! She said Robert was once a priest who, in addition to speaking his native tongue (which was French) and the language that normal people speak (which is English), he had once been a scholar of dead languages like Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Glenda sighed and raised her hands to the gods and said it was a shame to have lost all that talent. But that’s what you get for riding a bicycle along a city street without a helmet. I shook hands with Robert and smiled and said hi, and he took my hand and pumped it like a lumberjack yanking an axe out of a stump. He said he was studious of my knowing and ratcheted fifty as per my domain. I told him that it was all well and good, but I was doubtful, which seemed to make him happy because he broke out in a big grin and slapped me on the back. Glenda was delighted and said she thought the two of us would get on famously. So there you have it. As punishment for throwing egg bombs at the American consulate, I had to go twice a week to the CIA and read to a priest named Robert and take him for walks around the block when the weather was good.
I had no idea what to read to Robert, so Glenda suggested that, because he was a priest, maybe I should start with the bible. I’ve never been much of one for the bible because mostly it’s a big set of coded protocols designed to get inside your head and control your thoughts, so I had to go to the store and buy a brand new one. Turns out the bible is pretty long, so I cheated and started in from the second part of it. I sat myself down with Robert beside a big picture window that looked out onto the street, and there I started to read from the Gospel according to John, whoever he was: “In the beginning was the Word.”
Well I couldn’t even get out the first sentence without realizing I was reading a load of gibberish. Whoever heard of capitalizing something mid-sentence like that? Big “W”. Robert must have thought it was gibberish too because he slapped the open book on my knee and shouted: “Log! Log!” At first, I didn’t know what he was getting at. But, even though Glenda had said there was nothing of sense in his speech, I still got the feeling he was telling me something. And sure enough, when I thought about it a little more, I knew exactly what he was saying. The bible was made of paper. It was, when you really think about it, a log, just like a table or a toothpick or a framing stud. He was telling me the bible had come from a log.
Then I thought about it more closely. Thinking closely has always been my downfall. That’s what my mother used to tell me, and even the judge got after me for thinking myself into knots over America’s web cam hacking capabilities. Still, I can’t help myself. It’s part of who I am. So I thought about how I was reading from the bible and how it seemed to me like gibberish. But I know it isn’t gibberish. Northrop Frye got famous for calling it the great code. And it is. There are all sorts of hidden messages in it. Six six six is only the beginning. It even predicts things like wiretapping and web cams. It’s in there. Just read the book of revelation. Well then it occurs to me that maybe the same principle applies to my friend Robert. Maybe it sounds like he’s talking gibberish, but he’s really giving us a coded message. After all, Robert was a priest, so he’d know all about that way of communicating. Maybe my job is just to listen a little more carefully than all the others. Maybe Robert’s been trying to tell us things. Maybe higher powers, like aliens or colophons, have been using Robert as a tool for communicating with us—only they’re getting frustrated because most of us are too dull to notice.
I went in twice a week to read to Robert, and sometimes, after I’d read for a bit, we’d have ourselves a walk and talk about religion or politics or national security or mind control. I could tell by the look on his face that he enjoyed our conversations and had deep thoughts all his own. He told me the intractability of gastro-enteritis was more necessity than a truck can hovel—which is a remarkable insight if you look at it in just the right light. Another time he told me that clouds have the inclination of putrefaction unless the carrying agent has formidable constancy—which is absolutely true! And I told him so. Of course, after that remark, the gristle was improbable and so I had no choice but to bring in new reading materials. It’s sad to see how a priest can lose his faith, especially when nobody else really understands his situation, so I took it upon myself to show him that at least one person in the world knew where he was coming from.
I started with the Antichrist’s Cookbook. I worried that Robert might find it too controversial. I worried that he might get whiplash going from one kind of reading to the other. But he didn’t seem to mind. Together, we read about how to make pipe bombs and he smiled and nodded with every new instruction. We went on to a chapter about how to bring down even a big server farm by mounting a denial of service campaign, and that got him excited, especially the part about the host, though I got the impression he took a lot of things too literally. Then we went on to an almost art book called Graffiti as a Record of Social Change that I’d borrowed from the library using a stolen library card (so the government couldn’t track my reading habits). It was a coffee table style book with big glossy pictures. Once, Glenda poked her head into the room and was delighted to see how animated our conversations had gotten. I’d talk about how wrapping a nude figure around the corner of a building was a symbolic statement about the submission of the human form to the brutalizing effect of modern architecture. And Robert would come back with an observation about the servile comeuppance of the breast in the remonstrance of the intaglio procedure. Our chats were an inspiration, and when we were done for the day, I couldn’t wait for my next visit.
I don’t want to give the impression that it was all inspirational. For example, there was one day when Robert had a cold and I found myself utterly disgusted by his sneezing and slobbering. But the most difficult day—for me—came when I looked at Robert and realized how sad his life had become. Here was a man—a priest—who had renounced the priesthood. I know. I know. You could say that falling off a bicycle and getting a brain injury doesn’t exactly count as a renunciation of your vows. But that’s just the point. Even if it wasn’t a conscious renunciation, it could still be an unconscious renunciation. There could have been an unconscious influence that pushed him off his bicycle. Improbable, you say? But consider what he said to me one sunny afternoon in the middle of July: “The compass of our being fastens to the unsettled comforts that trivial reports to the more decided types of our mind.” What could be clearer! In those spare but incisive words, I knew that Robert had renounced his vows and that the CIA was conspiring with the Vatican to keep him from breaking his vow of chastity.
“Let’s go for our walk,” I said, pretending to be casual so I wouldn’t attract attention.
“The trees have garbled foil when the poetry gets depended from a blissful toque.”
“Don’t joke with me,” I told him. “It’s pretty unequivocal. You need to get laid, and I’m the answer to your prayers.” I spoke that last bit in whispers because Glenda was down the hall and was probably in on the plot.
We went to the park across the road, like we usually did, but this time we went clear through the park and out the other side where we caught a cab and rode downtown. Actually, we didn’t ride directly downtown. We rode to the west end, got out, caught another cab, rode to the east end, got out, caught another cab, and took that cab downtown. You can never be too careful. It’s impossible to tell how organized they are when it comes to keeping an ex-priest from breaking his vow.
Now let’s be clear about this. I expect when you picture Robert, you have in mind some stooped-over, grey-haired old geezer of a prune running around in a black robe with a cross dangling from his neck. Nothing could be further from the truth. Robert was a young guy, not much older than me, with nice-looking features notwithstanding a bicycle accident that had played mush with his head. He was slender, with an athletic build, and when we went for our walks, I had trouble keeping up with him. If he had taken the notion, he could have torn away from me and run off in any direction he pleased, and there’d be nothing I could do to prevent him. He was that spry. But he never caused trouble because he was an amiable sort who loved to smile and talk and bask in the company of other people. He had longish blond hair with just a hint of grey at the temples, and when he looked out from beneath the bangs that fell across his eyes, there was kind of a—well, I dunno—some of the lady volunteers had taken a shine to him. So running off to get Robert a bit of action wasn’t as outlandish as it sounds.
We found ourselves sitting on a pair of bar stools in a dive of a pub and carrying on a conversation with a pair of lovely ladies named Cyndi and Cindy who seemed to think I was quite the radical intellectual with a friend who was quite the looker. I smiled and raised my pint of bitters while Robert told them he was amiably recused to the disposition of offal sustenanced through our mutual commerce. That was the first time I ever thought maybe Robert was out of his depth. He had insisted on ordering a double of Johnny Walker Red Label, but I was beginning to think he wasn’t as experienced a drinker as he let on. I didn’t want to be stuck in the position of having to cover for him. If this was to be a lasting friendship, then he’d have to hold his own in situations like this.
It turns out Cyndi and Cindy had an apartment just upstairs from the bar. I thought that was an extraordinary coincidence, but Robert just waved it off, which set me to thinking maybe this priestly friend of mine was a little more worldly than he had first let on. We followed the two lovely ladies upstairs and found that the apartment was mostly a glorified bedroom with an extra closet and a Jacuzzi tub. The bed was enormous. You could have landed a commercial jet liner on it. Just as things were starting to get interesting, there was a sharp rap on the door and loud voices sounded in the hallway. Cyndi was wearing more clothes than the rest of us, so she answered the door. Two police officers burst into the room, big burly guys, probably lovers (I know how these things work). Robert was sitting naked in the middle of the bed, and though he has difficulty talking, he had no difficulty making his wants be known.
One of the police officers referred to some scribbles on an index card that he held in his right hand, then he looked around the room. “We’re lookin’ for a guy named Robert Ludlum. ‘Zat either of you two clowns?”
He stared into my eyes. “‘Zat you?”
I shook my head.
Then he stared at Robert. “How ’bout you?”
Robert made wild motions above his head while his equipment wobbled around in circles. “Bazookas rip the tartan off a pleck and plith!”
“Right.”
Well, as you can imagine, things got worse before they got better. Turns out the CIA doesn’t like it when you take their patients out to get laid. Turns out they’re tight with the police, too. The upshot was: I couldn’t spend any more time with Robert—which is upsetting because he had so many important things to tell me. And the other thing, of course, was that I got arrested again. When it came up for trial, they weren’t as lenient with the so-called kidnapping as they’d been with my egg-bombing episode. I got public service again, only this time I had to work with seniors at an Alzheimer’s unit. They don’t have so much to say—not like the aphasic priests.