Bergamo Arrives at the Mission
It was built as a house for a god, and one finally showed up
There were huge towers out on the deserts and prairies, beaming a constant mix of comedy, music, news and opinion, on radio frequency. But nobody in Ash Fork had ever seen microchip technology. The racks of preamplifiers, filters, processors mixers and effects boxes were the possessions of someone richer than they could imagine, because they own the future.
It was ten o’clock when the train came in, and most people were at home, on small farms and ranches scattered on the high desert beyond the town. A few were in the Mission Inn tavern, where a man named Cisco was playing piano chords while his wife, Mary, crooned into a microphone. She was telling a man named Mr. Jones that her body wakes up in the night and calls him, though she never makes a sound, it’s a voice, she says, from the underground.
Every man in the place was concentrated on the idea of where the voice was coming from, and two or three of them were visibly flaring their nostrils for more information. Behind his dark glasses, Cisco smiled up toward space and rocked his body in rhythm to Mary’s stylings. The song ground slowly to a halt as the porters came through from the portico with the racks of audio gear. The place went dead silent.
Everybody knew that he was coming, but nobody knew when.
The Mission had been in Ash Fork since anybody could remember, but nobody knew who it belonged to. It was like asking who Ash Fork belonged to. It belonged to whoever or whatever put a self-replicating factory underneath the surface. They didn’t even know they were an invisibility cloak over the top of a munitions factory. They knew what they were programmed to know about the past, and one thing that was programmed in was that the Mission was a house that belonged to a god.
The town had split into two factions. One believed that the god would be returning as the fruition of a myth, which would renew their energy by introducing an anomaly into the field. The other faction thought this was superstition.
The Real Estate agent’s sign was perpetually there, though nobody called him, as nobody in Ash Fork was remotely rich enough to buy the Mission, which waited, like Sleeping Beauty, for what was hidden to emerge from the spell put on time. Gradually the pews were taken out and distributed to the homes in the valley for table seating, as they were simple, rectangular benches, the right height for a picnic or dining table.
Once the floor was cleared there was room to dance, and one side of the chancel was just right for the piano, while the other side was perfect for the service bar. A ceiling had been constructed at the tops of the windows, so that the upper part of the building was now private space for private affairs.
Now everything was changing. The owner was here, and he was bringing with him black boxes with windows in them, and behind the windows, darkness. He was also bringing a shift of power. Sometimes after you use somebody else’s property long enough you begin to think it’s yours, and you resent it when they want it back. These men were no different. They knew it was his, but that didn’t discourage a sullen resentment.
“What do them boxes do?” The man who asked blushed and his adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He kept his eyes straight toward Bergamo though he seemed to be suffering an irritation that made them weak and liquid. He glanced around and gathered up what support there was in the room for prying into the owner’s affairs in a direct and vulgar way.
“These boxes are for processing sound,” Bergamo said. “They can detect it and reproduce it perfectly, add effects to it, and amplify it. I am a musician, gentlemen, and my instrument is very much like an organ, except I don’t need the pipes.”
“What do you need then?” the man pressed. His right leg was bouncing up and down, keeping the tempo of his otherwise concealed agitation.
“Nothing,” Bergamo said. “I have everything I need. But thank you for asking.” And with a smile and a nod toward each quadrant of the room he began to direct the porters up the stairs, putting his attention on making sure they understood how delicate these instruments were, and how valuable. “Don’t let them hit against anything, gentlemen, please.”
“Now do you see what I mean about this fellow?” Wilson asked the young man beside him. “Morris Grundig over there was trying to be sociable with him, just asking him what these machines are he’s got. Does he say they are radios? Or record players? Maybe some kind of fancy gear from a recording studio in Nashville or New York City? No, he says, ‘My organ is very much like an instrument, except that …”
“He didn’t say that,” the teenager said quietly, cutting his father’s train of thought so gently that it coasted to a stop. There was a moment of silence before the son continued. “He said the instrument is like an organ, except that it doesn’t require the pipes.”
“You knew what I meant to say.”
“Yes,” the boy agreed. “I knew what you meant to say. But what I don’t know is why you seem to not like the Count. We all knew he was coming one day. That he was going to bring us to heaven. That’s the thing we all said we believed in, were supposed to believe in. And as soon as he walks in and lays claim to what is his …”
Wilson laughed. There was a tone to it that suggested he wasn’t going to be fooled the way he had been fooled before, when he was young, like Lewis. He turned and looked at the boy and felt that shock of seeing himself when he was young. Could he have been that beautiful? He flushed at the thought and stared hard at the image of Bergamo moving out of sight up the stairs, his black suit blending into the shadows just beyond the glowing electric lamps set as artificial stars into the new ceiling.
The major constellations were outlined to give the sky a feeling of an authentic earth sky viewed from the southern hemisphere. Cisco moved smoothly into a series of jazz chords, and Mary began to sing about what it might be like to make love somewhere in space, where there’s no time when we don’t make time, make love to me tonight. Cisco smiled and rocked his body, stared up into the faux universe.
“It isn’t that I don’t like him,” Wilson said. “It’s just that I’m not so sure I trust him. He’s somebody that would bear watching, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” his son said.
“Well, if you don’t understand certain things,” Wilson said curtly, “that’s a good reason for you to stay clear of him.” He slapped the boy on the back like he’d just met him, and walked grandly up the center of the nave toward the bar, acknowledging any eye contact with a smile and a slight nod of greeting. His son didn’t follow him. He went back outside and circled around the building to see if there was a window open, to maybe hear Count Bergamo playing his musical instruments.
On the east side there was light in a window, and as soon as he stopped and looked toward it the Count’s face appeared and they looked directly at each other for a moment. Then the face was gone from the window above, but remained in the psyche of the boy.
