“I wouldn’t assume murder. Although it has come up twice already.”
“I’m not a psychopath. I just like to fuck with people. After I spook them, I walk out. I just walk right out the front door and go home. I don’t touch anything or anybody.”
Father Tim thinks for a moment. “And do your . . . targets . . . how does this affect them? Do you know?”
“One thought it was a nightmare, I think. Like, sleep paralysis. Another was in a psychedelic phase at the time. So, you know. It hasn’t had the intended effect, yet.”
“What is the intended effect?”
When Moses does not reply, the priest tries again. “How did you choose these people?” Father Tim asks. “To target?”
“The first bullied me when I was growing up. I found out she still lived in West Hollywood, so I . . . I just . . .” Moses trails off. “I had a stutter when I was younger.”
“Oh?”
“It was bad.”
“When did it go away?”
“Not until college,” replies Moses. “And it still comes back sometimes, when I’m stressed or tired or what have you.”
“And this person ridiculed your stutter?”
“Yes. We went to the same boarding school. She also made fun of my weight. Other kids joined in, of course, but she was the leader. She made these little cartoons, she called me Moses the Moon. I was a sort of local planet, always haunting the school with my obesity and my stutter, in her drawings. She’d draw me in the sky, with students below, and the students would be running from me.”
“That must have been very painful.”
Usually, Moses hates when people say this, or versions of this, but from Father Tim, it sounds less like an exit from the aforementioned pain and more like an entrance into it.
“And what about the second person?” asks Father Tim. “What made you choose them?”
“Oh. He was my roommate from college. I took him with me on spring break one year—my mom had this place on Pumpkin Key—and he had some kind of . . . some kind of sex with her. My mother. Took some photos. Publicized it, sold the details and everything to a tabloid. Her people had to buy the story back to bury it.”
The priest pauses. “Has there ever been a time when you wanted to punish someone but refrained?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I wanted to do this to my ex-girlfriend. Jamie. She was in special effects. She was twenty-five—I should have seen it coming, I guess. Cheated on me with some startup douche. Maybe that’s redundant. Startup douche.”
“And why did you refrain?”
Moses considers. “She knew me too well. She might have figured it out. She was pretty smart, for an astrology wackadoo. And then what, you know?”
“Figured what out, exactly?” asks Father Tim.
“Who was to blame.”
“You think she would have connected the event with you?”
“I know she would have. She was intelligent, like that.”
“Tell me more about your mother,” says Father Tim.
Moses notices a weird grin on his own face—one he can’t control. He is relieved that Father Tim cannot see him. That’s what he tells himself, at least.
When Moses remembers his mother, he sees a montage of Fourth of July parties. It was Elsie’s favorite holiday—she must have been so grateful to die shortly after it passed. Every year, she threw a party that cost the average American annual income. The Best and Brightest always made an appearance, along with a bewildering abundance of small-town mayors. As a child, Moses was sent away for these parties. As a preteen, he locked himself in his bedroom. As a teen, he observed. In his twenties, he wrecked himself with drinks and drugs. In his thirties, his objective was sex. In his forties and fifties, he just stayed home.
It was hard for Moses to explain his mother’s obsession with the military, which informed much of her personality, politics, and taste in architecture. Her obsession was further complicated by her identification as a socialist. She was blacklisted around the time her lupus took over and her opioid addiction began, by which point she had accumulated many reasons to retreat from Hollywood and did not need to be forced.
She used to display her collection of exotic weapons and taxidermy on the walls of her mansion for the party alone but over time decided to leave them as permanent decorations. She got the idea from a Scottish castle where she once filmed a period drama on family secrets. “It communicates that you are not to be invaded,” she once explained to Moses.
The Blitz of July, as Elsie called it, was a scripted yet feral event, characterized by games, winning, abundance, overpopulation, glitter, and red meat. Even, twice, rooster fights. She had professionals install misters and fans across her estate to counter the heat so that all the skin glistened and all the hair fluttered; guests who were already prone to posing were practically hypnotized by these conditions, drooling at the enhancement of their own allure. There was always a trampoline, a chocolate Slip ’N Slide, somebody making clouds. An aquarium petting zoo. Every year, Elsie imported bands from around the world—her only stipulation was that the bands could not be American. There is nothing more patriotic, she believed, than importing another country’s talent. Nobody listened to the music, but everybody loved it. The guests worked hard to make their power visible and their efforts invisible. Moses thinks of his mother and sees celebrities in one-of-a-kind swimwear, fluttering about like piles of trash on the streets of Manhattan. With the best skin, teeth, and hair that money could buy, they chatted about justice, speculated about the sexual lives of those who were even more powerful, and decried automation as if it were coming for their jobs. Service people were omnipresent, but Moses never saw them.
For as long as he could remember, Moses had a recurring dream that he was wandering a Blitz of July party, the scenes warped and fish-eyed, the music mutated, the hair unanimously blond. In the dream, he had information about an urgent threat—an assassin lurked among them, the house was surrounded by guerrilla enemy soldiers, terrorists were waiting on the roof, a drone was about to drop a bomb—but when he tried to warn the guests about it, he discovered that he was voiceless. He would scream and no sound would emerge.
“Well, that one’s no psychological mystery,” his therapist told him.
“My real name is Moses,” he admits urgently.
“Interesting,” says Father Tim.
“What?”
“In the Bible,” begins Father Tim, but Moses sneezes six times in a row, as though allergic to the reference. He is a yell-sneezer.
“God bless you,” says Father Tim. He waits for Moses to recover. “You okay?”
“Yes. Sorry. Go on.”
“So in the Bible, Moses’s mother stows baby Moses in a watertight basket to protect him from the pharaoh, who had ordered all baby boys to be fed to the Nile. He was afraid that a boy would overthrow him one day. She still fed him to the Nile, but she put him—”
“I know, I know,” says Moses impatiently. “Everyone knows. What of it?”
“So Moses’s mother abandoned him to protect him,” says Father Tim. “What do you suppose your mother was trying to protect you from, by abandoning you?”
Moses does not want to pursue this allegory. “I wasn’t named after that Moses,” he says. “I have nothing to do with him. I was named after an urban planner. A monstrous one. A racist! Parking lot after parking lot. Highways everywhere. He wanted to build one through Washington Square Park!”
“Fame?” suggests Father Tim.
“What?”
“Was your mother trying to protect you from the fangs of fame?”
Fangs of fame—who is this joker? “No. In fact, she pushed me toward the industry. Relentlessly setting me up with auditions, screenwriting, production jobs. Said I wouldn’t be able to make anything of myself on my own, so I was lucky to have her.” Moses scratches his neck. “Is this how confession normally goes?”
“Every confession is different.”
Moses can’t quite recall his last confession, only the circumstances that inspired it—he had been thirteen, on a vacation in Rome with two boarding school friends and their nannies, when one of the nannies insisted. “We’ll wait outside,” said the other nanny. “No,” said the first nanny gravely. “Everyone must confess.” Moses and his friends concluded that she had just committed a crime. The next day’s news reported that the tooth of a long-dead queen had been stolen from the manor they had toured. The nanny had a pixie cut of hair that changed color every month and a wardrobe of white jumpsuits. She was some kind of painter, without family or community, always hauling around French manifestos, clever and visibly exhausted by the human condition, although she was not yet thirty years old. The type to do such a thing.