So went Olpert’s life through his thirties, into his forties, punctuated with the sporadic glory of the Lady Y’s, his season tickets renewed devotedly each campaign. His body aged: the rusty mop atop his skull thinned and withdrew, his torso softened, the mightiness of his pee stream dwindled. As a kid he’d been an old soul, sombre and serious, taking nightly walks around the Islet with his hands clasped behind his back, and had always assumed in adulthood he’d at last find a home within his own body. Yet at forty-two he still felt apart from himself. Betty suggested a girlfriend might help, instead Olpert took to keeping moles: half his small room was taken up with a terrarium in which they burrowed and lived their delicate, private lives.
In March one of his housemates had taken a message:
Olprt Balie call Griggs
, and there was a number: 978-0887. A bland, almost robotic voice answered —
NFLM
Temple, Head Scientist speaking — and explained that
all
Helpers, even inactive ones, were required at a mandatory meeting that weekend. You work
security, Bailie? asked Griggs, and Olpert told him sort of, yes. Well
we can use you then, Griggs said, make your grandpappy proud. And at this Olpert felt something shrivel in his chest.
The following Thursday night he ferried to Bay Junction and switched to a Yellowline westbound to Lower Olde Towne. The Temple was two blocks up Knock Street, housed in what had at one point, before the Mayor’s sweeping reforms, been a police station. The building’s history was hinted at over the doorway: in rusted steel lettering,
OLDE TOWNE POLICE SIA ION
— one-and-a-half T’s had fallen, the half having maimed a postwoman, the lawsuit was ongoing.
Olpert paused on the doorstep, flooded with memories of that year spent trailing his grandfather into the bi-weekly meetings, less at the old man’s side than in his blindspot. As a Recruit, he’d have his mouth ducktaped and spent meetings wedged into a Little Boy Desk. Later everyone but the Recruits pounded schnapps and staggered into the neighbouring Citywagon Depot to unleash orange splashes of meaty man-vomit.
The door swung open and standing there was a six-foot-tall moustache. Bailie! Remember me? growled the moustache. He tapped his nametag —
Reed
— and hauled Olpert into a handshake that felt like losing an arm to a trash compactor.
I was L1 when you were a Recruit, said Reed. L2 now though.
Olpert recognized him: a manic character keen on workshopping masturbation techniques, his own involving slit fruit.
Reed rattled his bones with a clap on the back, screamed, Diamond-Wood, ready for your ducktape? and leapt away to wrestle a kid on crutches into a headlock.
At a sign-in desk inside the doors, between hauls on an inhaler a Helper named Bean handed Olpert a nametag — in a child’s scribble:
Belly
— and told him. You’re the only call-up, you know that? You start your own club or something?
Olpert faltered.
Just fuggin with you. Great to have you back. Now head on in, guys’re just getting their shine on.
Little about the Temple had changed. The walls were still panelled in a plastic approximation of wood, the floors the chipped tile of an elementary school gymnasium, track lighting flickered by the bathroom doors — one denoted with an M, the other with an upside-down W. Queues to both toilets choked the corridor, and whenever a man came out the next one went in fanning the air in reverent disgust.
Everywhere men performed manhood: punching, wrestling, grunting, roaring — there was so much roaring. All the Helpers wore nametags, official
NFLM
golfshirts, khakis, and the generic black sneakers of elementary school custodians. Olpert’s own uniform, resurrected from his leaner, lither Recruit days, spandexed his body, and his shoes — loafers, always loafers — seemed conspicuously unsporty and brown.
From the recroom came the burnt sour smell of too-strong coffee, pingpong ticktocked within a rumble of voices. Helpers sprawled on recliners, the bigscreen chopped between classic episodes of the incredibly popular
Salami Talk
and the
NFLM
’s own We-
TV
fixture (mostly pingpong). In the library things were more docile: a half-dozen men swirling snifters of schnapps debated the topic of Helping. Beyond this Olpert hovered as a child might outside his feuding parents’ bedroom.
Well people here just don’t seem to appreciate how we hold the city together, a man was proselytizing, to murmurs of agreement. Most people, he continued, most people wouldn’t know what to do if we stopped helping. It’d be chaos!
A different man jumped in, lisping: Ju
θ
t ba
θ
ic
θ
urvival, people have no idea how to
θ
urvive if they have to. They’ve got it too fuggin ea
θ
y.
Dack, come here, growled the first man, let’s see how you’d get out of a chokehold.
Some shuffling, a pause. The first man was flipped on his back.
See? he called from the rug.
That’s
how we do.
That’
θ
how we do, confirmed Dack.
Another man spoke up: My neighbour, you know what he’s got in his garage? Nothing. Honestly, it’s amazing, shelf after empty shelf — not even a
hose
.
Amid jeers and snide laughter, Olpert thought of his own garage: the roominghouse didn’t have a garage.
He drifted back through the foyer into the dimly lit, high-ceilinged, pew-lined Great Hall. The walls were the same fake wood as the rest of the Temple, but stained darker, suggesting the kitschy austerity of a stripmall funeral parlour. Ringing the room were portraits of late Original Gregories — and here, by the door, was Olpert’s own grandfather, face youthful and taut, gazing down along a pelican’s beak of a nose.
From the front of the Great Hall came a smashing sound — a gong, the Summons, the night’s assembly would soon begin. One by one the High Gregories emerged from a semi-secret portal that led to the Chambers and took their seats upon the dais. In the shadows, wielding a felt-tipped mallet, stood a massive, bullet-shaped man with no discernable neck — the Summoner — beside whom the gong hissed into stillness. Had he always been there, Olpert wondered, lurking in the dark?
With a great crash the Summoner struck the gong again. Last up from the tunnel appeared Favours, pushed out in a wheelchair by a ducktaped Recruit. Favours, the final remaining
OG
, appeared to have been unearthed from the grave: a face made of dust, eyes that ambivalently surveyed the living world as though already glimpsing the other side. The Recruit positioned him upon the dais and retreated.
Affixed to the wall above Favours’ head was a six-foot version of the
NFLM
crest: atop an outline of the city, a naked woman and winged man entwined in coitus. Above this image was written
New Fraternal League of Men
:
The Mighty Ones of Eternity
, and below it the four pillars:
Silentium. Logica. Securitatem. Prudentia.
The gong exploded again, again, again, and Olpert slid into the end of a pew as Helpers shuffled in, some twirling pingpong paddles. The High Gregories took their seats on the dais, flanking Favours. At the far end of the table was Wagstaffe, the
NFLM
’s current Silver Personality and host of We-
TV
’s
Salami Talk
, which featured interviews leavened with a barely euphemistic sausage-making theme. In person he was even more orange-skinned and drastically chinned than he seemed on
TV
.
Beside Wagstaffe was Magurk, the Special Professor, a ratlike
and savagely hairy man. As an L1 he’d wrestled Olpert into a half
nelson and demanded to be told which pressure points it was possible to kill a man by striking. Out of nowhere Olpert’s grandfat
her
had come barrelling down the hall, dropkicked Magurk in the lower back, and, as he crumpled, suggested, That one?
To Favours’ right, in the Imperial Master’s chair, sat a tense, taciturn man Olpert remembered as Noodles — older than the rest, in his sixties, golfshirt tailored into a turtleneck. Framing a stoic, pink face were a white brushcut and matching goatee. Noodles rarely spoke, just icily observed, yet was always nodding, as if his head were physically affirming its own secret thoughts. He worried Olpert even more than Magurk.
Griggs, the Head Scientist, took the podium. His hair was puttied into twin crisp halves, beneath which his face remained expressionless and waxen, almost animatronic in its movements, the way the forehead crinkled and flattened, the nose dipped obediently when he opened his mouth to speak. Quiet now, he said, in a voice like wind over water.
Pivoting on his hindquarters the bullish Summoner wound
up and bashed the gong a final time. The murmuring around the
room faded. Everyone stood for the Opening Oath, led by Griggs in a droning monotone from the pages of
How We Do
, the ongoing codex of
NFLM
ideology and activities. Olpert joined where he
could remember: Let us all swear an oath
. . .
A new year is dawning
. . .
Stay awake to the ways of the world
. . .
sworn and bound
. . .
in eternal execration
. . .
the last days and times
.
.
.
from generation to generation and forever
. . .
the mighty ones of eternity
. . .
all men.
The gong sounded again, the
NFLM
lowered into the pews, and the Summoner, perspiration ringing his armpits, squeezed into the empty seat beside Olpert. He nodded, a downward bob of his neckless head, his shoulders were foothills that sloped into the mountainside of his face. With a glance at Olpert’s nametag (his own read:
Starx
), the man took Olpert’s hand and whispered, Good lookin out, Belly.
Starx’s hand was weirdly tiny for such a huge man. The handshake felt to Olpert like having his fingertips gummed by a small, toothless lizard.
Hi, said Olpert. Good looking out.
The meeting got underway: Griggs conceded the mic to Magurk, who took it in his furry fist and began strolling the aisles. Terrified he’d be recognized, singled out, perhaps even attacked, Olpert slouched and averted his eyes. From the back of the Hall four Recruits crammed into Little Boy Desks, ducktape over their mouths, videotaped the proceedings — that was new, the cameras. One was the cripple, Diamond-Wood.
The rest of the men were the same as ever, broad and tense, with a primordial intensity in their eyes that goaded: Try and test me, just try. All of them, save Griggs in his socks and sandals, wore those same black sneakers. Olpert covered his left loafer with the right, then the right with the left. For some reason he found himself trying to estimate how many individual testicles were in the building — and had to shake his head to rattle the dangly jungle this conjured from his brain.
Magurk’s speech, whatever it had been, was over. My people, he said, you ready to show this city the best weekend of their lives? Are you with me? Are you fuggin
with me
?
Yeah! roared the men.
Starx punched the air, grinned at Olpert, whispered, Gotta love this stuff.
Magurk passed the microphone to Wagstaffe, reassumed his
seat at the edge of the dais, rabies frothed at the corners of his lips.
Positioning himself in the Great Hall’s most photogenic light, Wagstaffe spoke rousingly of courage, the four pillars, the
NFLM
’s responsibilities, history, order, the cameras rolled. The speech seemed a little too performed, infused with a mannered nonchalance meant to deny the presence of a viewership beyond the Temple. But people would be watching. They always were.
Was it less of a lonely life to be watched like that? To know you
were seen? Olpert thought of his own life, the furtive hush
of it. As a child he had more than anything wished to be invisible,
to just drift through the world without being heard or judged.
Two pews back was Reed, stroking his moustache. Did Reed have a wife? A family? Or was the
NFLM
his only family, and was that enough? The New Fraternal League of Men, thought Olpert: like a religion, except all they had to believe in was one another.
Wagstaffe handed the mic to Noodles, who pressed it to his lips, nodded, nodded, the room was silent, expectant — and with a final nod tendered it to Griggs.
Applause.
Helpers, Griggs began, though Olpert lost focus — Starx had shifted, his arm pressed against Olpert’s. It was a hot, heavy arm. He was very close, he smelled of boiled cabbage and wet towels clumped on the floor for a week, his nostrils flared and whistled. There was something almost soporific about his breathing, the steady in-out rhythm of it, it lulled Olpert, he listened and lost himself a little —
And now Starx was elbowing him, standing. Everyone was standing.
Olpert flushed and jumped to his feet.
Starx moved gongside. What had Olpert missed? He checked his watch, an hour had passed, how? Everyone rose for the Final
Oath, which Olpert lip-synched as best he could. Starx banged
the gong a final time and came at Olpert, seized him by the upper
arms. Olpert tensed to create muscles there (biceps, triceps, whatever).