We’re Contradictions
Michael
Viv delivers the secure cable from the Telex machine to Marshall, waits for him to read it and respond, if necessary.
"Marshall, earlier today you had asked me about Hearst's state of mind in the 'family system' of the SLA. I had said that Jocasta was Patty's ticket out of that system. Jo seems quite intent on pulling Patty out intact. Do you still think Patty Hearst is worth recruiting?"
Brant
“I don’t know if I ever said ‘recruit’. I think I said I want her for ourselves. Different things, you see. Either way: that’s not my decision to make. My role is merely to guide.”
Michael
Genevieve nods. "As much as Patricia has imprinted upon Jocasta, so has Jo imprinted on Patty. Did you ever see Bergman's Persona? I've been thinking about it a lot this week."
Viv waves her hands as if to say, "Enough of that," and gets to what she's really been wanting to talk about. "It has been quite a week, hasn't it? All these late nights. I've had to invent out of whole cloth a man I've been casually seeing so Charles isn't suspicious about my being out late. Sort of the inverse of the usual spousal tradecraft, I imagine," Viv laughs.
Brant
Genevieve nods. "As much as Patricia has imprinted upon Jocasta, so has Jo imprinted on Patty. Did you ever see Bergman's Persona? I've been thinking about it a lot this week."
“I generally have the Special Ones watch things for me and then summarize them in our weekly sessions — Lord knows I don’t have time these days to go to the cinema. Why? What are the parallels you’re seeing?”
Michael
"Well, as far as I'm concerned the film is Bergman's singular masterpiece," Genevieve says. "A meditation on the violence that patriarchy inflicts on womanhood, the... eerie folie à deux that can result from two traumatized women finding each other and forming a psychosexual matrix, a mutually-reinforced, er, Elektra complex," Viv pronounces the Freudian concept with no little sneering irony, "where identity becomes reciprocally blurred and as a result violence against both self and others becomes a real possibility... In the film this depersonalization ends up breaking through the fourth wall and showing us the, well, artifice of patriarchy, in the form of the motion picture cameras and lights, a structure that traps women in their traditional performative roles."
"I know we're dreaming a new world into being now, thinking differently—and Marshall, on a personal note, I cannot thank you enough, again, for finding it within yourself to trust me with bearing part of this responsibility—and this kind of blurring of identity comes into play quite naturally when we consider the spiritual aspects of our work. Jo's powers are perfectly adapted to this task: she's a radical empath with the power to read emotional remnants on objects and places. She's someone who can crawl around inside other people's skin. I've read Jocasta's files, I know what trauma she's bearing. A dead mother, an oafish but blusteringly powerful father. Patty Hearst won't be the last Patty Hearst that Jo will bring back to us. Jocasta's building an army of people like her; she is a magnet, and subjects like Patty are the steel."
"I guess what I'm saying is... are you and the rest of the team ready for this new world you're dreaming to be run by women?" A brief, meaningful, eye-contact-filled pause. "Women like Jo and Patty?"
Brant
Marshall returns the stare. "The only way to win this game," he says, "is to be ready for anything."
Michael
"Mmm. That's very magnanimous of you, actually," Genevieve says with sincerity. "The toppling of the current ontology's power structures, well, there's many of us who'd stand to lose quite a bit from that. I'm certainly among them."
"The role I was destined to play when I met you all, the healer's role, is still one I am enthusiastic to play, you know. At all levels of the Club. If URIEL are the piece of grit that the snowflake or the pearl of the new world may... accrete around, it behooves us all to examine that our—your—priming role will imprint on the new world. If the original Bohemians left a flaw in their design, one the Enemy was able to use in order to irrupt, the lesson Patricia and her ghosts bring us is to attend to those dangers in ourselves. And I'm not just talking about Corruption here. I'm talking about all of us, from you to Archie and the Club to me, Andrew... even Dave and the kids at Shasta—our trauma."
Brant
Marshall raises an eyebrow but says nothing.
Michael
Viv shrugs. "It's something to consider, anyway. Marshall, since we first got acquainted—after the feint where you brought in Jocasta and Charley to see me, of course—I've been impressed with your intelligence, your acuity, your sensitivity, your dedication to your spirituality. But I think most of all I've been impressed with your clinical ability. You're... you're an excellent psychologist." Viv says this with a great deal of emotion, as if it's the highest compliment she can pay someone. "What you did for Alan... well, I need to admit that I would never have had the assertiveness to save a man from his own demons like that. The old me wouldn't, that's for sure."
"You're a healer too. Maybe a surgeon rather than, say, an herbalist, but a healer just the same."
"Charles has observed that given my radical openness, I tend to gravitate to people in professional and fan contexts who project themselves to the world as enigmas. There's nothing I find more fascinating than the opportunity to get to know someone better who I consider worthy, to really dig into their psyches, their lives, in order to celebrate their uniqueness as a holy reflection of the Monad. That sort of thing is not for everyone, I understand. You certainly don't have to let me in."
"But if there are things you need to talk about, ever... my door is open to you, in love and in trust, as your teammate and friend."
Brant
After quickly checking with an admin to confirm no messages have arrived from the field, Marshall turns back to Viv, seating himself, as he does, on a desk where a young woman types a fake letter that means nothing, and which will be incinerated end-of-day.
"The thing about it is that you and I — we're two sides of the same coin. Two poles in the dvaita. We have the same dharma but we approach the dharma differently. From opposite directions. With different aims. We should be enemies. Rivals, at least. You should see me as a threat. Yet here we are. We're on the same side. Colleagues. You were even briefly in the 'Club', as Mitch describes us. The Club of people who Mitch perceives as being ... how would he put it, 'narratively significant'. And I guess our whole ethos now, if we're going to win this thing, is that we need to embrace these sort of contradictions. As Vivekananda said: sarva dharma sambhava."
"Anyway, I come from the old school, Viv. Dr. Bruner — you know Bruner, from Harvard? — used to tell us, 'Talk less. Always talk less. Let them occupy the space.' Of course, old spies like him, they're full of little tips. It's useful to listen. And that's what I try to do. I'd advise you to do the same, but you can't, can you? No more than I can bring an air of radical empathy and openness wherever I go. Because we're a contradiction, and contradictions are currently our best hope of winning this thing."
Michael
Viv smiles at the first bit, about Viv and Marshall being rivals in a different lifetime, and then laughs and blushes outright at "but you can't [listen], can you?"
"Well, Marshall," Viv says with a little bit of teasing irony, "maybe it's just that you're just so good at exuding and existing within that quietude and silence that you're able to get people talking."
And it's true. Marshall doesn't even need to use the Language or hypnosis a lot of the time, although getting ordinary people to talk is effortlessly easy when he does use them.
"See, that's the thing about this 'mission,'" Viv says. "The contradictions. Patty the heiress, Patty the revolutionary. Cinque the lost Black kid who turned to petty crime and then revolution, and Cinque the mind-controlled snitch. I've been hanging out with the leftist kids in spaces that maybe you couldn't enter in the same way, and vice versa. Even if I had had a glyph hanging off me, do you think I could've felt at home in the Bohemian Club the way you did back on Monday night, could've been calm enough to gather intelligence? Of course not. I would've been, well, maybe not seething at the plutocratic male privilege on display, but the social milieu would've had me unconsciously acting out, for sure. In a different lifetime, maybe you're probably over there yourself right now. Having drinks and enjoying the ambiance and God forbid, the company."
"The more I think about the time I spent with my eyes on that building on Monday, the more I think there's something very bad in there. And the more I think about the gentleman who warned Mitch off, the more I know there's something they don't want us to witness. I think you actually rattled them by going in there uninvited, Marshall. I don't think it was a feint or a double-bluff. I think the last 68 years since the Earthquake have left them feeling very smug, and unchallenged. If my suspicions about them are true, they really do feel like reality-as-it-exists is theirs, and theirs alone."