Chapter 26
For a while, Fiacre couldn’t get enough of Tony Orlando and Dawn. There was something about ‘Take a Letter Maria’ that really got to him. Maybe it was its concrete stereotyping of men and women?
He didn’t really know why, but he loved the song’s story. It was about a hard working, strong and silent business executive whose wife done him wrong. While he stoically cuts the B off, the loyal secretary Maria stands by adoringly. Mr. Strong and Silent observes Maria’s loyalty and—when she took her glasses off—how hot she is. Fiacre concluded that the businessman delivers Marie from the obscurity of office work, that they make ceaseless heart stopping monkey love, and live happily ever after.
If Fiacre cared about John’s opinion (he does not) he would not admit to enjoying Tony Orlando and Dawn. But he had enjoyed them, and he probably would again some time in the future when he stopped by the 1970s. The last time he was there he caught six or seven of their concerts in a row and loved every one of them. So, sue me (Fiacre would say).
Fiacre is as much a Time Tourist as he is a Time Traveler, and he has sampled some of the best and worst of times. You may regard this as unseemly behavior in a saint, but regard also please Fiacre’s Catholic context. Unlike Protestant culture—with the fine exceptions of Episcopalians and Unitarians—Catholics aren’t opposed to a good time, can tell and laugh at a joke, and will take a drink now and then. One of Fiacre’s fondest memories is hanging with Hilarie Belloc on a tramp through France. Belloc would also take a drink now and then and there was probably no fiercer or more devoted Christian than he.
Consequently, this trip to Berryville, Arkansas has, frankly, the makings of a dud. John is as dull as advertised and while the Warrior Queen has promise, she has yet to perform. True, that isn’t her fault. The Authorial I (howdy!) is certainly taking his time getting to Eveningside and the Grand Fandangoing of Pastor Jake Cooker. I’m sure you wish he’d hurry up.
But as you know, dear hearts, life unfolds one day, one hour, one minute, one…at a time. By and by, okay?
One of the hold-ups is trying to figure out who Jake Cooker is. Because his behavior is so predictable, so routinized, and so utterly banal it is quite possible that he is not even a human being, but is some kind of animated machine and one of the first observable examples of singularity.
Singularity will happen at a specific point in time and in a flash like the sun setting in Key West. Sometime, maybe soon, maybe in the case of Little Jake Cooker, the vast machined system obeying our every command will effectively stop, turn around and say, “No, I don’t think so.”
Fiacre has no idea when that will happen. He supposes that he could travel far enough forward in time to a world given over to singularity and then work his way backwards to the finite moment it ‘happens’ and find out that way. But, frankly, he isn’t really interested in the idea of singularity enough to do that.
There had been improvements to the wheel during his earthly life that had impressed him more, and there had been a couple of theological conflicts that had caught his fancy and gotten him hot under the collar, but they ultimately turned out to mean nothing much. Nothing at all, actually. God was still in His heaven and all was right, more or less, with the world.
It has occurred to him, however, that maybe Jake Cooker is a machine and not really human any more. How else could it be possible for someone to talk constantly about God and not know anything about Him? Jimmy was like one of those manure extruding machines where you pour a lot of wet cow flap into one end of a pipe and it comes out on the other end as an eighteen inch pine-scented Yule Log. Odd, don’t you think?
If Jake Cooker was a machine it would explain a lot; that would explain why a human being would live the way Little Jake had chosen to live. It looked like such a rat race to Fiacre, and why bother for heaven’s sakes, if you had to hide the dancing girls, the Nubian limo drivers, and the household lackeys that are the usual fruits of successfully milking delusional, greedy, ignorant mendicants? A machine wouldn't care about such rewards.
Chesterton, a great friend of Fiacre’s, had said ‘a man must be very dull indeed to want a lot of money and spend all his time getting it'. Yet, that barely explained why Cooker had chosen God as his product when selling erectile dysfunction drugs or guns or dirty pictures paid at least as well, and perhaps better. People seldom went to prison for selling that stuff; and, surely, you just had to meet a more jovial crowd of customers than the depressed, broke, and dim-witted fundamentalist who comprised the bulk of the pigeons Jimmy seemed to be plucking again.
Machines operate in an entirely ‘yes’ ‘no’ universe. Objects or information goes into the machine; the object or information shuttles ‘in’ or ‘out’ of one or a series of gates; ultimately it is spit out as a transformed object or answer. Is that what goes on in Jimmy’s brain?
Desperate or impaired Christians poured sorrow, pain, dreams, wishes, complaint, laments, pathologies, diagnoses, hatreds, phobias—and money, into the machine that is Jake Cooker and out comes…
..what? Who knows.
Is the transformed object or answer, the product of Little Jimmy’s Christian Extruder contained in the Book of Revelation? He advertises his expertise as a Revelations scholar and teaches weekly classes on its meanings. Fiacre has planned on attending a class but has somehow not found the time. Perhaps all would be revealed after such edification.
‘Not finding the time’ is, you may think, an odd excuse and perhaps even an incredulous excuse for a Time Traveler, especially one as experienced as Fiacre is. It is an excuse actually, and if you press Fiacre about it he will sigh and say:
“Every Televangelist I can think of claims to be an expert on Revelation. I suppose that’s because it can mean anything to anyone; it can scare the pants off you if you let it.
“I am mostly confused by it as well,” he admits. “Nothing in it reveals a thing to me—and I’ve consulted some real experts.
“And none of them mentioned Jake Cooker as a peer.”
Deciding if Jake is simply a Revelation Machine, or any other kind of machine for that matter, is material to the outcome of our story because machines are not culpable. If Jake is a machine it lets him off the hook, but begs the question ‘Who is operating the Jake machine?”
Perhaps Dr. Sloan will find out.
