The House of Rumour A Novel

9

the hermit





Cato found a room in a boarding house in Hastings Street. He’d decided that the best thing was to come to Detroit and start all over again. A new town, a new beginning. It was a good enough place to find work as a musician. Jimmy had said that the Flame Show Bar house band was looking for a new rhythm guitarist. And if he couldn’t get a gig somewhere soon there was always the automobile factory. Jimmy was coming by that evening to take him to this meeting he’d talked about. Cato wasn’t keen but Jimmy had insisted he come along. ‘It’s a good place to make contacts,’ he had said.

The room was small, bare and gloomy. Cato heard a distant wailing. He went to the window. The view was the brick wall of the adjacent apartment block. He dropped his case by the bed and his whole body shook for a second in a sickening shudder of grief. There was something hard and heavy in the pit of his stomach, a solid lump of remorse that he could not shift. As he sat down on the edge of the bed the mattress let out a sorrowful creak.

Taking off his shoes, he stretched out, closed his eyes and tried to take a nap, but he felt restless. It was hard to sleep during the day with no radio to keep him company. His head just filled up with unwelcome thoughts. He felt so goddamn lonely, that was the worst of it. He sat up and hauled his suitcase onto the bed. Rummaging through his things, he found a handful of magazines: Reader’s Digest, Confidential, a Time from last year with Martin Luther King on the cover, and an old copy of a garish pulp called Incredible Stories.

Something to read on the bus ride, he’d thought, though in the end he had simply stared out of the window at the passing world. He picked out Incredible Stories. It had a battered cover showing a blue-skinned humanoid flying through a red sky with a ringed planet on the horizon.

He stared at it, trying to work out why he had put this thing in his case. It belonged to Sharleen, of course. She loved this craziness. She had even been in one of those flying saucer B-movies back in the fifties. And she’d been married to a guy called Larry who wrote this kind of stuff. There were times when they got drunk or high that she would tell him weird stories of people from other planets and secret societies on earth who had made contact with them. Cato wondered if it hadn’t been science fiction that had sent her a little mad. Or maybe all those bad things she said had happened to her when she was a kid were true.

He couldn’t work out why she had kept this old pulp magazine. It was metaphysically out of date. With stories supposed to be set in a future that was already lost in the distant past. He read the date on the masthead. June 1941. Hell, that was three months before he was born. Over twenty-five years ago. He opened the book and one of the stories was called ‘Armageddon 2243’. Numbers reeled in his head for a moment. Jimmy had told him that numbers were the key. According to him, the whole universe was some kind of numbers racket.

‘God has three hundred and sixty degrees of knowledge,’ he had told Cato. ‘The devil has only thirty-three degrees. That’s how the Masons calculate their learning. Masons are in the power of the devil, that’s how they run things. They in charge of white folks.’ And at another time: ‘Eighty-five per cent of the people are the dumb masses controlled by the ten per cent who are the slave-makers. The other five per cent are the poor righteous teachers. Them that know the truth.’

Cato flipped through the magazine. There were advertisements for mouthwash and correspondence courses; line-drawing illustrations for far-out tales called ‘Plague Planet’ and ‘Robot Mission to Alpha Centauri’. One story caught his eye, perhaps because it was shorter than the rest. He lay on the bed and began to read:



THE HERMIT

By Nemo Carvajal

A humble hobo hides a cosmic secret!

In saffron robes and with flowing white hair and beard, the Hermit was a familiar sight on Hollywood Boulevard. He patrolled that stretch of sidewalk between Orange Drive and Highland Avenue in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He would never ask for money directly, though he would show passers-by his open palm and entreat them with a smile: ‘Please, let me help you.’ At other times he would offer this advice from Matthew 19: 21: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast and give it to the poor – and thou shalt have treasure in the heavens – and come, follow me.’ But he knew it was hard for most people to understand his mission on earth. They judged him merely as one of the many eccentrics who furnished the streets of this absurd city. Progress was slow. Most days he simply noted observations and looked for possible new developments to transmit in his daily report.

Noticing a beat cop approach, he prodded Sirius, the spotted mongrel curled up at his feet. Sirius gave a plaintive whimper and looked up at him imploringly. The Hermit reached down and patted him gently. Dogs (he had noted long ago) were the only animals on this planet that had a clear understanding of injustice. They could hear a higher frequency and it gave them a more finely tuned moral instinct. Their howls were the lamentations of worldly iniquity and dispossession. It was a clear signal but one that only the Higher Ones seemed to understand. Most humans had no conception of injustice. They thought only of justice, never the lack of it. They failed to register the canine wail that could provide them with such precious information and guidance. They would insist upon some warped sense of entitlement, a self-righteousness that could lead to nothing but an escalation of suffering.

The Hermit started to walk towards the cop so that he would be on the move by the time the cop reached him. Sirius trotted along beside him. He found a gait that would match the confident stroll of the beat officer, so that when they met they were travelling at the same pace. A little dance to the jaunty swing of the cop’s night-stick.

‘Hi, Pete,’ the officer called out with a smile.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ the Hermit replied. ‘For they shall be called the children of God.’

They passed each other to the count of three twirls of the baton. This was the rhythm of the upright and principled, thought the Hermit. This was the tick-tock in the minds of humans when they thought of the word justice. But he bowed graciously to the policeman. He did not despise the cops as some of the other Higher Ones did. At least they understood the burden of power that they carried. Sirius gave out a little yelp. She had spotted something.

‘What is it, girl?’ the Hermit asked.

Sirius yelped once more and the Hermit then understood what she was saying. She was calling the name ‘Duke’. Sirius had the capacity to recognise his fellow Higher Ones – this was another canine virtue the Hermit had noted during his time on earth. He looked in the direction of his companion’s call and there he was. The Duke of Sunset was on the other side of the boulevard. In his top hat and crimson-lined cape, he was the most famous bootblack in Hollywood. He spotted them both and crossed the road, shouldering his shoeshine box.

‘Hey, Serious!’ he said, crouching to stroke the dog. ‘How’s my best gal?’

The Hermit smiled. He tried to remain impartial but he couldn’t help seeing the Duke as the favourite of all his fellow Higher Ones on the boulevard. The light poured out of him. His work was so diligent, his lesson to the humans so clear and simple.

‘Gave Clark Gable a shine yesterday!’ the Duke announced.

The Hermit frowned. By the look on the Duke’s face he deduced that this ‘Clark Gable’ was one of the benighted wretches imprisoned in those high-walled mansions he often passed. Those who had had their spirits sucked out of them by the light machines and were turned into ghosts while they still lived. He patted the Duke on the shoulder, glad that he could have given this man some solace.

‘You may have saved his soul,’ said the Hermit softly.

‘Aww,’ the Duke replied, looking down at the Hermit’s bare feet. ‘I wish I could give you a shine, Pete.’

‘One day I’ll wear shoes just for you, Duke.’

The Duke laughed and began to move on.

‘Yes, sir!’ he called out to the Hermit. ‘Patent leather!’



Cato sat up and put the magazine down. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. He lit it and puffed away for a while, thinking. He blew a smoke ring and watched the pale blue vortex hover and disintegrate in the space above the bed. A strange story, he thought, as the ghostly O began to stretch out and distort. About the everyday but with a twist, like those TV shows The Twilight Zone or The Scanner, where something ordinary is revealed as belonging to another dimension. Cato thought that he had guessed the trick of the tale. It was that this hobo guy was really an alien. Then he made another guess. Maybe he just thinks he’s an alien.

He thought about the black character in the story. At least there was a black character. It was just a shame that he had to be a shoeshine. Then Cato remembered a guy in LA just like that. A shoeshine who wore a cape and a top hat. Perhaps this Duke guy was an alien too. Maybe that was the point of the story. That all the street people were Higher Ones and had come from another planet.

Cato glanced at the blue-skinned man on the cover of Incredible Stories. He suddenly thought of a joke. Brother, he mused, nodding at the illustration, you aliens can come blue-skin or green-skin, just make sure you don’t come black-skinned when you land on this here planet. He laughed and coughed. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the bedside table.

Quit smoking, Jimmy had told him. Quit smoking and quit drinking. Quit eating pork. Lead a righteous life. Quit going with white women, Jimmy had said. Cato sighed. His mouth was dry and tasted bitter. Sharleen had just got more and more screwy. He didn’t even know whether to believe her when she said she was pregnant. Only that there was trouble ahead and it was time to go. She told him the FBI were listening in to their phone conversations. She believed that the Nazis were controlling the space programme. She saw UFOs all the time. She could give details of many species of extraterrestrial, their particular worldly influence and their secret ambitions. The one thing she didn’t understand, thought Cato as he cleared his throat, was that his people were the true aliens on this here earth.

He picked up the magazine once more and curled up on his side.



As he made his way through the day the Hermit met with some of the other Higher Ones of Hollywood. Doc Hegarty, who handed out pamphlets that warned against the eating of meat, fish and nuts, explaining that protein caused unnatural lusts; Preacher Bill, who could give clear advice on the coming apocalypse; and Madame Pompadour, an ancient ex-prostitute who walked the streets now out of habit and would often fetch coffee and doughnuts for the girls who still worked the boulevard. But mostly he tried to minister to the needs of the desperate souls who passed him by.

In all the time he had walked the earth, tramped its highways, hitched rides or jumped freight trains, he had never known such a forlorn place as Los Angeles. A city so ravaged by materialism and a people weighed down by so many possessions, deluded by ambition and the painful need for adulation. After his first report he was ordered to stay here. To continue to observe these extreme conditions. And maybe to help to bring some relief to this barbaric region.

It was not enough, his superiors had decided, simply to make contact with the most advanced and privileged classes of this strange planet. The Hermit had known the civilisation of the shanty towns, the refined society of mission halls and soup kitchens. And he had learnt much in the great university of Camarillo State Hospital, where white-gowned students came to learn wisdom from some of the greatest minds on the face of the globe. But he had to go beyond, to bear witness to the barren emptiness of this bright and gaudy wilderness.



There came a knock on the door. It was Jimmy.

‘You ready?’ he asked Cato.

‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘But listen—’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Jimmy broke in. ‘Just give it a try, that’s all I’m saying. Islam is the natural religion for black folks.’

They went together to a meeting hall that called itself a temple. Jimmy tried to hustle them both to the front but Cato shook his head and took a chair at the back. Jimmy shrugged and sat next to him. A light-skinned black man in a leopard-skin fez started talking. Cato had heard some of it before. That the African had been deceived by the slave-masters, cut off from their true knowledge and true religion. The Original Man was black and his was the root of all ancient civilisation. Cato yawned quietly. He felt all the weariness of his life flood through his body and pool onto the floor of the meeting hall. He was overcome by a blessed sense of calm. He closed his eyes. God is not a spook, came the voice of the preacher. God is a man. The devil is a man also.

Cato let go and felt himself falling. Then the physical weight of his body seemed to drop away and his spirit began to soar. The voice spoke of the civilisations that existed on other worlds, of how the moon and the earth were once one planet before they were split apart in a huge explosion. Then it was dark in his head. No sound, no light. No space, no time. A moment that lingered eternally. Then Cato’s head nodded sharply and he woke up with a start. He kept his eyes closed and listened.

The preacher was talking of a great wheel in the sky. Like the vision Ezekiel had seen. The white man is planning for battle in the sky. Today he has left the surface for the air, to try to destroy his enemies by dropping and exploding bombs. But we too are ready for the battle in the sky. The great wheel is the Mother Plane and it can exist in outer space. Ezekiel saw it long ago; it was built for the purpose of destroying the present earth. It carries fifteen hundred bombing planes. The small circular planes called flying saucers that are talked of these days are surely from the Mother Plane, the preacher declared.

Cato opened his eyes and found that they were filmed with tears. A single drop warmly traced his cheek. Yes, he thought, of course. All this madness made some kind of sense. Everything flipped over with a complete change of polarity. The world turned upside down in a geomagnetic reversal. He closed his eyes once more and felt that calm shadow cool his mind. He thought of what it was like to see the darkness. He saw the darkness. And he saw that it was good. Yes. Black people belonged on the earth. It was the white folks who were the aliens. The meeting was coming to its end in a cacophony of scraping chairs. Cato wiped his face with his handkerchief and stood up.

Even Jimmy noticed a change in him as they walked back to the boarding house.

‘You okay, man?’ he asked as they reached the front door.

‘Tired, is all,’ replied Cato.

‘Sure. Well, we’ll talk soon, yeah?’

Cato nodded and shook Jimmy’s hand.

Back in the room Cato switched on the light, stripped down to his underwear and got into bed. The bare bulb hurt his eyes but he wanted to finish the story.



Westward was the Hermit’s journey along Hollywood Boulevard. By four in the afternoon he would reach St Thomas the Apostle Episcopal church. The Temple of Doubt. After Judas, the Traitor, the Hanged Man, Thomas was the greatest disciple. The patron saint of uncertainty, this great principle that now even the scientists know governs our puny universe. The humans think that they want belief; Thomas preaches that what they need is incredulity. Enlightenment on a need-to-know basis. Stick your finger in the wound. Then you might feel the pain of another. Compassion, the Hermit remembered: it means ‘to suffer with’.

By sundown they had reached the far end of the boulevard, where it began to snake and twist its way up through Laurel Canyon. The city fell away as the Hermit and his dog Sirius climbed the Hollywood Hills. A grid of lights stretched out below, an illuminated cage. Above, the celestial mechanics were firing up. The constellations began to bloom as man and dog followed the winding path to their base camp in the foothills. Treasure in the heavens, thought the Hermit. The Dog-Star rose on the eastern horizon and he pointed it out to Sirius. She let out a howl of salutation.

‘Yes,’ agreed the Hermit. ‘Home.’

They lived together in a wooden shack at the end of a footpath that cut through the brushwood. The Hermit lit an oil lamp and gathered together his equipment. From a Higher One who ran a junk shop in Santa Monica as cover, he had been issued with a Philco model 40-74T four-tube battery-powered radio set. He switched it on and as it warmed up he turned the dial until he found that particular band of pulsating static that he recognised as the native language of his home planet. He then began his nightly broadcast.



Cato got up and went to switch off the light. A trace of neon throbbed against the wall outside his window. He sat on the bed and smoked another cigarette. His last, he told himself. He might write to Sharleen, he thought. Maybe she would understand. Maybe she did already, in her own way. He could sleep now and not fear his dreaming. He silently thanked God or Allah or whoever for untying that knot of guilt in his gut. He stubbed out his cigarette and got back into bed.