Christian Nation (5 page)

I was of course nervous about introducing Emilie to Sanjay. I knew he would be genuinely delighted that I had a girlfriend. But I also knew he could not dissemble, and I greatly feared that he would betray either doubt about, or disapproval of, my choice. Being in the first stages of love, or perhaps just being dense, I didn’t have the slightest worry about how Emilie would react to Sanjay. I simply assumed she would find him as fascinating as everyone else did.

“Well?” I asked Sanjay after their first meeting, which occurred over my trademark swordfish dinner and seemed to me to have gone well.

“She is most delightful,” he said. “Lovely, smart, and clearly interested in you. You are lucky.” I didn’t read anything into the brevity of Sanjay’s verdict, and I was vastly relieved at the time that he hadn’t felt compelled to point out any of her flaws.

At first Emilie didn’t fully understand my friendship with Sanjay. She was perfectly cordial in a disinterested sort of way—in the way, I suppose, that lots of women are not terribly interested in their boyfriend’s male friends. But once she started spending frequent nights at my place, and realized that I spoke to Sanjay almost every day and saw him at least once a week, she could not hide her annoyance.

“What does he give you that I can’t?” she once asked. And, after too many glasses of an old and expensive Armagnac, she made a statement she never would have made sober: “
I
want to be your soul mate.”

After we had been a couple for a couple of years, Emilie and I reached an accommodation on the Sanjay issue. She and he became friends, and she adopted a role of motherly concern for a not very practical child, mocking his idealism and occasional spectacular lack of understanding of the ways in which human beings usually relate to one another. She simply chose to ignore the irritating fact that Sanjay’s continuing role in my life was a symptom of something missing from our own relationship.

T
HE YEAR 2005
was a good one. I graduated near the top of my class from law school, started a job in the best law firm on Wall Street, and acquired an attractive and successful girlfriend. I did not take these things for granted. Nothing in my background—even four years at one of the country’s most elite universities—had prepared me for my life in New York City during the boom period that preceded the financial crisis in 2008. I made $125,000 my first year as a lawyer—more than the salary that my hardworking father was making after thirty years at his job. The Wall Street that I entered was not the Wall Street that became so reviled following the 2008 financial crisis, with its lethal brew of myopic focus on short-term profits and faith in financial alchemy. At the firm, I found a truly diverse group of men and women, from across the country and the world, who had risen to the top of their law school classes through extraordinary academic performance and were attracted to the firm by its culture of quality and integrity. And it really was a meritocracy. No one who started in my class of lawyers at the firm had obtained their positions through family or connections.

There were, of course, rewards. In addition to the salary, we got first-class training and great work. We also ate with clients in the city’s best restaurants, learned not to feel guilty when drinking hundred-dollar bottles of wine, rode around town in radio-dispatched “black cars,” and—when entertained by RCD&S partners at their penthouse apartments and perfect country houses—received a glimpse of the life that we too might have. Despite the suddenness of our immersion in this world, within a few months it seemed entirely natural and completely deserved that we now sat near the top of the vast pyramid that was New York City.

The quid pro quo for our provisional access to this rarefied world was total dedication to the firm. The first rule was that the clients were to be treated like gods. Their phone calls and e-mails were to be answered promptly. Their requests and deadlines, no matter how unreasonable, were to be met—and met with perfection. The firm was obsessive about quality. We aspired for our work product to be perfect. In doing legal research, no stone was left unturned. Every possible solution to the client’s problem was explored and analyzed. I quickly came to have pride in the firm, while at the same time doubting constantly that I was really up to the job. For a young lawyer, the sources of stress were manifold. I was often exhausted from lack of sleep. Worse was the uncertainty. You made plans but never knew when a last-minute assignment or crisis would keep you at the office. Your friends quickly became used to empty seats and unused tickets. And for overachievers accustomed to excelling at everything, having memos and drafts come back from senior associates and partners covered with corrections and comments was deeply disturbing.

E
ARLIER TODAY
I
looked up and was startled to spot a person walking along the far bank of Indian Lake. I quickly convinced myself that each time the man stopped and turned toward the water, he was staring across at the cottage. If I could see him, I thought, then he could see me through the large plate glass window. My heart raced. I didn’t know whether to be still, so as not to attract attention, or to go and alert Adam. I chose not to move. Sitting here, ridiculously frozen, I was overcome by a feeling of guilt: guilt for being off the Purity Web, guilt for lying to Lurlene at the archives, guilt for breaking their rules. But quickly guilt turned to anger. Faced suddenly with the possibility that this project, which I had taken on so reluctantly, would be interrupted or terminated, I became angry. I have not been angry for a very long time.

When the person moved farther down the lakeshore, I went downstairs and found Adam. He could see I was shaken.

“What’s wrong?”

“Someone is out there,” I said, my voice trembling slightly.

“Let me see.”

“You can’t. He’s gone,” I answered.

“Are you sure it was a he?” I nodded. “And where was he? On the other side of the lake?”

“Yes. He was staring across at the cottage.”

“OK, thanks for letting me know. Don’t worry about it. It’s probably nothing. Some of the old-timers remember the lake and walk here.”

“Not an easy place to take a walk,” I said.

“No, you’re right. It could be a deacon. But if so, there’s nothing we can do. Don’t worry about it.”

When I seemed reluctant to return to my desk in front of the window, Adam asked me a strange question.

“There’s something I want you to think about, Greg. When you remember 2005 and the start of your career, what were the things you believed or assumed then—the certainties you embraced—that ultimately proved most wrong?”

Whether or not it was his intention, he succeeded in distracting me from worrying. It was an odd question, and a hard thing to think about. Of all the things I held certain at the beginning of my adult life, which one was most mistaken? Of course, there’s my family. I never imagined I would lose them so early. But that’s not what Adam meant. At the start of my career, I knew that the exact path of my career would not be clear or certain. But I did think that the ground over which that path would lead would be more or less stable. I believed that the stage on which my life would play out—this country and its institutions—would be essentially static and unchanging. I see now that this was a spectacular failure of perspective. I should have known from history that the ground on which we take the walk of our lives is shifting and unstable, and that change is unpredictable and spasmodic. Nothing seems to us—in human time—to be more solid than the ground. And yet in reality the earth’s crust jerks across the globe in devastating spasms. Centuries or millennia of rock-solid calm punctuated by a few minutes of heaving and rolling readjustment. This is the perspective of geological time.

But after the cataclysms of the twentieth century, it seemed to me in 2005 that the ground was stable. Indeed, the framework within which I thought my life and career would unfold seemed so settled as to be invisible. The status quo—a stable federal union, an open society, democracy, personal freedom, or indeed basic civil order—was so expected, so much a given, that not once did even a flicker of appreciation for these things cross my consciousness. What I gave no thought to then, though, has for the last fifteen years never been far from the center of my mind.

W
ITH
N
EW
Y
ORK
having recovered from 9/11, and the credit and housing bubbles being in full flower, life in New York seemed strangely detached from the broader trends of the Bush years in America. When one of our Princeton friends got married in central Pennsylvania, I rented a car, and Sanjay, Emilie, and I drove together to the wedding. These excursions out of the city often gave us a sense of dislocation, a sense that the suburban and rural America of our youths—not so many years before—was changing beyond recognition.

“There it is again,” said Sanjay.

We had been driving through a sprawling landscape of shopping malls and housing developments, grotesquely ugly beads strung randomly along a strand of four traffic-choked lanes. The cars—windows up cocooning their passengers in air-conditioning on a lovely spring day—mysteriously shuttled among malls even though most seemed to contain exactly the same blend of national chain stores and fast-food outlets. The rare undeveloped pockets between commercial strips and sprawling housing developments hosted overscale billboards carefully angled toward the slow-moving traffic. Sanjay had noticed a particular billboard advertisement, repeated over and over, that featured a recognizable image of Jesus, looking rather more stern than I was used to, looming over the dome of the Capitol building in Washington with the strident message “The time is now” floating above on a banner supported by two angels. It seemed there had always been religious billboards, most of a fairly anodyne variety, announcing, for example, that “Jesus Saves.” But this seemed different.

“Tomorrow belongs to me,” I said.

“What?” asked Emilie.

“The song. That’s what the billboards remind me of. In
Cabaret
, when the young Nazi starts singing. You know, ‘Fatherland, Fatherland give us a sign …’ I can’t remember the rest. But it ends with ‘Tomorrow belongs to me.’ It always gives me the creeps. I mean serious creeps. Not sure why. Every time I hear it I get goose bumps.”

“You are a sentimental twit.” Emilie had started to pick up all sorts of anglicisms from the British bankers at Credit Suisse, a habit that had started, even then, to annoy me.

The wedding was in a suburban “mega-church”—a large gray metal building seating thousands and surrounded by acres of blacktop parking that entombed the fertile soils below that had been farmed for centuries. I had never seen anything like it. It was near the intersection of two state highways, far from any village or town center. Other than a grossly overscaled cross mounted on the roof, the architecture was not at all ecclesiastical. It could have been a factory. The complex included a vast sanctuary with a platform at the front that was more stage than altar, with elaborate theatrical lighting. In another bit of stagecraft, a large crucifix, which looked to me as though it was made from fiberglass, was suspended by invisible wires, giving the appearance that it hovered over the back of the stage. A rock band was positioned on one side, and a large choir in shiny purple robes was on the other. Enormous video screens were arrayed, stadium-like, around all sides of the room. During the service, a talented producer chose images for the large screens. He projected close-ups of the preacher but frequently interrupted that feed in favor of ecstatic faces from the audience and angelic choir girls who then appeared in flashing superscale all around the room. This clearly was religion as entertainment. It made me remember that so much of the historical success of Christianity was owing to its ability to embrace and incorporate popular culture from all parts of the world and all eras. The pagans are wedded to celebrating the winter solstice? No problem, we’ll shift the birthday of Christ to accommodate.