Let them look west, p.1
Let Them Look West, page 1
Let Them Look West
Marty Phillips
L E T T H E M L O O K
W E S T
by
M A R T Y P H I L L I P S
An imprint of Antelope Hill Publishing
Copyright © 2021 Marty Phillips
Second Printing 2021.
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Owen Cyclops:
owencyclops.com
Edited by Taylor Young
Interior Formatting by Margaret Bauer
The author can be contacted at:
MartyPhillips@protonmail.com
The publisher can be contacted at:
Antelopehillpublishing.com
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-82-4
EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-83-1
AUTHOR’S NOTE
What you are about to read is a fantasy story in the technical sense. Realism is sacrificed at times in service of a dream. As is the case with nearly all real dreams, including the one that follows, fantasy as the absolute victory of one’s desires is made impossible by the limitations of one’s gullibility within the dream state. This story is not in the service of a happy dream, nor is it a nightmare. It is perhaps most accurate to call it a mundane fantasy. This book is dedicated to my family and the friends who have helped in proof-reading, editing or simply offering encouragement in the process. It is especially written for my brother. You believed in me from the beginning, and for that I will always be grateful.
Marty Phillips
CONTENTS
Part I: Tabernacles In A Strange Land
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part II: Fleeting Images In A Disembodied Head
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part III: The Singing Mountain
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part IV: A Stillborn Lie
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART I
Tabernacles in a Strange Land
CHAPTER
1
T
he thought of flying out to the middle of nowhere filled Rob Coen with apprehension. The sickly sensation had consumed him for weeks. He was even more distressed by the fact that his own actions had created the entire situation. He could trace the domino path of cause and effect straight back to a few seemingly inconsequential actions. He could do this because he had sat at length more than a few times and traced the history.
The first domino had tilted in the lunchroom at The Times where he worked as a journalist near the bottom of the pecking order in the politics department. He had been writing mostly local and some minor national campaign reporting for a few years, but his was not a household name, even in the world of journalism. Rob was a step above the interns and rookie reporters, and that was just about the extent of his influence. He had learned over the years to find the delicate balance between the dangers of too much ambition and too little. Rob was reasonably comfortable inhabiting the reliable yet unremarkable middle ground.
On the day in question, the interns and younger writers milled about or sat over sandwiches wrapped in glittering, transparent plastic, Styrofoam and paper cups of cheap, acrid coffee, boxes and cartons of tepid and quasi-organic ostensible food hunted in corner markets, gathered from bustling bodegas, or maybe even cobbled together hastily in the cramped kitchenettes of their shared living spaces.
It was a typical scene. Carter Owens, the only of the editors who deigned to eat in the lunchroom, haunted his back corner at a small table by the sink and worked his way through the daily crossword, glancing up occasionally and surreptitiously through his anachronistically out of fashion wire rimmed glasses over his coffee mug after taking a sip. His presence was uncommon but not unusual, and the happenstance of it on that specific day formed the final wavering impact of the first domino into the second. In retrospect, his involvement and appearance seemed more foreboding and anomalous in the way only recollective imagination can revise visions of the past. His perfectly white hair and cropped beard now gave off an unnatural impression.
The writers began to discuss a recurring and mundane hypothetical about who would be their ideal interview subject. The answers were all predictable: rising star progressive politicians, technology visionaries, household name musicians. Rob found the question idiotic and the answers painfully but expectedly unimaginative. Normally in such a situation he would sit back and drink his coffee and eat his turkey sandwich as all the mind-numbing chatter formed a distant hum in the back of his head. On that morning for some reason he decided to give his own input once there was an auditory space wide enough to fit in a few words. It was not in character with his typical adherence to carefully maintained obscurity. Rob had tortured himself in the many nights since, lying awake and analyzing his motives for opening his mouth. He had come to the conclusion that there was no motive, that it was a paradoxical accident of probability and incomprehensible external forces.
“My dream interview would be with someone the media tends to view as hostile. Interviewing somebody with positive momentum in the journalistic world is boring.” He did not realize how insulting the comment sounded until it was out in the open.
The room went quiet for a few seconds before one of the more assertive young politicos asked, “Ok, so then who would you interview?”
Rob let out the first name he could think of that fit his description, “Governor James Alexander.” He knew that the phonetic sequence comprising the name was enough stimulus to elicit immediate disdain from his colleagues. A burst of scoffs and mild protestations sounded around the room.
“He’s a crank,” someone replied after the initial reaction died down.
“What’s the point of that?” a younger fresh-faced intern asked. “Interviewing people like James Alexander just grants them legitimacy.”
To everyone’s surprise, Carter Owens spoke from his corner of the room. His voice was startling by its very presence and clear but quiet. Every head turned in silent curiosity. “James Alexander already has legitimacy. To say that is not an ethical judgment. It’s basic reality.” The intern blushed at the admonishment. Owens then turned to Rob. “Why don’t you pitch the interview to Margaret?”
“I hadn’t seriously considered it,” Rob deflected. “It was just a hypothetical.”
Owens did not say anything more. He only gave one last scrutinizing glance before returning to his crossword puzzle.
At the time, Rob thought little of the conversation in the lunchroom. A few days later Margaret Hunter the politics editor called him to her office. Since she was his superior, it was a common request and nothing to set off his alarm bells. He was entirely unprepared for what came a few seconds after he settled into a reddish-brown leather chair facing her expansive glass desk.
“Rob, I heard about your idea to interview Governor Alexander and I think it’s good. It’s unexpected honestly, but good.”
“Really?” he asked. It was all he could manage in the sudden confusion. He felt very warm and cold at the same time. He stared at her slightly creased fifty-something features for a hint of a cruel joke in the words. Nothing. He plunged inward to his murky resting place beneath the surface of his externally sensory faculties to reconnoiter. Had Owens told her? Of course. He was the only possibility. But why? What boomerang of cosmic injustice existed beyond Rob’s understanding? He surfaced to get some context from what Margaret was saying.
“He has been out of the public eye for a bit, and that fact could present an opportunity. If we want to reintroduce the world to James Alexander, then it must be appropriately dramatic. He is such a polarizing figure. I think an in-person interview could really blow the doors off.”
“Wait, you want me to go to Wyoming?” he asked, trying to mask the incredulity.
She smiled encouragingly. It was not a feeling she could project effectively. “I know you have reservations, Rob, but this is a huge opportunity. Something about the notion really struck the editor-in-chief.”
“The editor-in-chief?”
“He has an eye for these things. This is your big break. If I were you, I would just jump in with both feet.”
“I understand,” he murmured quietly. A “big break” was the sort of thing he had been trying to avoid. He tried to smile but was unsure what actual expression resulted. Rob understood that he would not have a career for much longer if he tried to refuse the assignment.
He called the governor’s office that same afternoon to make an initial inquiry. Between rings, he hoped into the void of silence on the other end of the line that an in-person interview was out of the question. “I see, yes, the governor is a busy man,” he could see himself saying. The woman he spoke to on the other end was very friendly and extremely accommodating. By the end of the conversation, he had a three day visit in his calendar and a stone resting in the bottom of his belly.
Rob spent many hours of the days leading up to the trip in Margaret’s office listening to her advice, taking notes, and nodding along with a serious look etched on his face. He became painfully aware that this was as much a risk for her as it was for him. She had arranged some company money for him to go.
The journalists more attuned to the universe’s underlying cruel irony shot him little savagely sly looks and m
He packed for a three day stay with a sensation of complete dread. On the ride he hailed to the airport, his legs felt numb. He floated through security and along the terminal like a disembodied phantom. As the plane taxied on the runway, his stomach lurched in exaggerated imitation of every sudden movement and mechanical clunk of the aircraft. The ascendant roar of the takeoff was lost to the white noise of his brooding mind. He stared longingly at the emergency exits and wondered if he aimed his jump perfectly, could he send himself directly into the engine’s turbine and mist out in a vaporized and combusted cloud into the thin air behind them. He smirked at the thought.
The governor of Wyoming was not the kind of person he had imagined ever interviewing, despite his hypothetical assertion in the lunchroom. James Alexander won his election in a tumultuous time and had taken advantage of a wave of reactionary revivalism across America’s Heartland and the Middle West. He had declared that he had “no interest in whoring the state out for a dollar.” In one of his more well-known speeches he declared that “the term GDP stands for goddamned pointless.” He had said that there was no use making people rich if their souls gave out in the meantime. He declared that man was meant for greatness and not to be enslaved by “trade and toil and money and oil.” These would have been fine sentiments if he was not a religious nut.
Within the first year of his first term, he held a special vote on whether the state should build a next wonder of the world and dedicate it to the risen and resurrected Son of God. The vote passed. James Alexander decided to call the monument Mount Calvary.
The luminaries of national politics and culture reacted to the developments in Wyoming first with shock, then knowing nods and finally open derision. One commentator famously called the proposed monument, “a big pile of dirt to serve as a burial mound for the passing of a fanatical specter soon to be put to rest in this nation.” A more sympathetic journalist wrote in reply:
There is an energy to Alexander’s revolutionary politics, his plans for the monument and transformation of the state of Wyoming. Yet I cannot help but sense a desperation, as though some integral part of what was once America is slipping through his fingers and he seeks perhaps tragically to grasp at it before it is gone entirely. Everyone knows the identity of this passing ghost, but they cannot articulate it completely. They touch parts of that desperate thing it is but cannot fathom its entire being. Is it the civic traditions of a Christian people? Is it the dream of a waning European diaspora? Is it the flickering remnant of that dying thing a certain kind of American called ‘The West’? It is all of those things yet none fully, and everyone knows the extent of its meaning deep down.
As a matter of consensus—the consensus of late-night television hosts, celebrities, finance commentators, and cultural critics—this passing was laughable and welcome, and they partook in the clownish lampooning of a funeral procession.
Mount Calvary remained in the national spotlight as it ran into a skeptical state legislature. During the stalling period, private donors in the state began their own funding drive to break ground. Before a year had passed, the construction fund enjoyed generous attention from all the old, forgotten and obsolete lost causes around the country. It became a point of pride for a certain kind of citizen to pinch pennies and put in what they could. Millions of dollars poured in from those who wanted to see the monument made if only to stand as a relic in defiance of the elite national political and commentary class. The mocking and gawking by the critics in the media likely made the project more viable than Alexander’s own efforts. Eventually the massive influx of contributions and interest convinced most state legislators and they fell in line.
The monument had officially opened for visitors after two years of construction and enjoyed a massive pilgrimage of curious onlookers, true believers, and naysayers. It was a man-made mountain built atop an existing rise of earth. A spiral shaped pathway two miles long led up to the summit, and visitors traveled it up passing by murals of the Stations of the Cross along the way. A second shorter path led back down beside artistic tributes to the resurrection and early church.
Rob had read about all of this and the governor’s life in the days leading up to his departure. The son of a Dakota oil worker, James Alexander had no interest in politics or religion for most of his early life. He worked in agriculture in his youth, as a mechanic, and eventually put himself through school to begin work in finance. He tried his luck at this for several years and made a comfortable living for himself in New York City. In his mid-thirties, Alexander had an awakening of some sort and left his career in the city for local politics in his home state: first as treasurer of a county and then mayor of a modest town of over ten thousand. That was when the transfigured James Alexander fully appeared. His gubernatorial run as an independent candidate against the sitting Republican was the surprise of the political season. He organized his political base in the churches, speaking as a guest in every congregation he could find, no matter how small. The pastors liked him because his antics brought people in the doors who would never attend a Sunday service otherwise.
Rob Coen figured it was a smart play. He could not fault the strategy from a tactical perspective. Hot potluck meals, some good speaking from a charismatic man, and an opportunity to feel for a little while like you were a part of something, had been the winning combination of local and state politics for about as long as it had existed.
The incumbent governor hit back, of course, framing Alexander as a radical and a hypocrite. National pieces condemning Alexander’s cold-hearted and ruthless moves in the world of finance broke in the major papers of record. Nobody seemed to care. Alexander addressed the bad press in his stump speeches with the reply that “God can transform even the most ardent sinner into a loyal disciple. I will never deny the iniquity of my former life! When I belonged to the devil, I wanted to be his best soldier. The same holds true now, but now I’m working for the man on the white horse.”
The people of the state, by and large, loved it. There was no ambiguity in James Alexander. Unlike the other politicians, he never hedged or adjusted depending on who was his audience. He famously went on a hostile evening talk show and took his licks from the host with a placid grin. The host asked him, “How are things going in the nineteenth century these days?” The audience broke into thunderous laughter. Alexander replied without missing a beat, “Well, we don’t have television or stand-up comedians, so I’d say we’ll probably make it just fine.” He was the internet sensation the people loved to hate, but he had also discovered a weary undercurrent searching for a secret love.
Rob flipped down the tray table and opened his laptop. He minimized the research tabs on his browser and opened the document of potential interview questions. To say that he wanted to trap the governor into saying something controversial would be too explicit. Controversial statements would come from the man to be sure. Alexander was a bigot after all. He was, however, a clever bigot. Rob’s goal was to guide the conversation toward a climax of some kind. He had not yet decided on what the crescendo of the overall movement would be. He found religious talk boring but was willing to suffer it to get at some deep-seated and yet unrevealed idiosyncrasy of Alexander’s identity.
The governor was not married and had no children. There could be something in that. It seemed a contradiction that a religious fundamentalist of his kind had no family. Following such an avenue could be tricky. Rob did not want to come across as overly ruthless in his inquiry. Surgically extracting some hidden hypocrisy with too much zeal may backfire, although he doubted the readers of The Times would bat an eye. The two of them would probably spend most of the conversation talking past one another.
