Page 49 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Cabalocracy and the Hall of Mirrors

We shook hands and I got out of there before I said something
inappropriate and soured the deal. Out on the street I realized I had
been sweating. If this goes through, I mused walking back to the bus
stop, I’ll be able to buy a better brand of deodorant.
The next day Curtis Capra was flush. His main concern was that
he would receive the money free and clear. He had written out a
receipt to that effect, and I was happy to forward it to Al Magnus’s
mail drop. Within a week I had my reward and shifted into mindless
consumer mode. Jack Dawes disappeared: had Capra bothered to
send me copies of his manifesto they probably would have been
returned by the post office.
I think I was well into another Lord Bountiful project when my
favorite conspiratorialist appeared briefly for his fifteen minutes of
fame on the nightly news. Curtis Capra had considerably expanded
his work, way beyond what he had revealed to me, but I did not—
could not—take it personally. My employer’s conviction that an
identifiably determined crackpot would not use manna from heaven
for any purpose other than the furtherance of his eccentric ideas
would not be shaken: Capra simply hadn’t told me the whole story. I
couldn’t fault him: he had no reason to confide in me and I hadn’t
wanted to make the gift contingent on anything like final approval of
his text. I don’t think I would have been able to grasp all of its
implications, anyway. He turned out to be too clever by half—and his
theory might only survive as a monument to folly.
He had privately printed ten thousand copies of a slim volume
entitled Cabalocracy and the Hall of Mirrors and sent it simultaneously to
libraries and media outlets around the world. I, of course, had no
copy of it. Nevertheless, abstracts of the document appeared in the
back pages of one or two newspapers, so I was able to get the gist of
it. No doubt most of the recipients discarded the thing unread,
deluged as most people are with manifestos and pitches for every
imaginable sort of scam and scheme. Its scholarly tone did make it
stand out enough to get what little notice it garnered. I don’t know
what response Capra expected, but he probably concluded that
disseminating it like dandelion seeds in the breeze provided the best
chance of having it take root somewhere in a generally infertile

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