shoe salesmen. Dress a bum in Armani and spritz him with cologne, and he looks like the CEO of Gulf and Western.'
'Yeah, yeah, turn it into a joke. But do I look like a Hollywood success?'
'Somebody has to play people who look like you.'
'That's what I did for years. Walked by in the background wearing a plaid shirt and carrying a bottle in a bag. Bumped into featured players in elevators. I had a three-year stretch where my longest line was 'Oops.' Now I'm a star. So what's the difference?'
'I give.' I hate guessing.
'The Church.'
'The Church made you a star?'
'Sure it did. Of course it did. I'm only a TV star, I know that, but, Jesus, Simeon, do you know how much money I made last year?'
'Skippy,' I said, disappointing the people nearest to us, 'there are a few secrets a man should keep.'
He clapped a hand guiltily over his mouth. 'You're right,' he said from behind it.
'But it's the Church that made the difference,' I said by way of a prompt.
'Didn't I say so?'
'Can we be specific, or is that against the rules?'
'There aren't really any rules. It just gave me access to what I already had. I had the skills, I had the experience, the voice, I had all the resources it took to be successful. But I didn't know how to get to them. It was like I was living in a diamond mine but I didn't know what a diamond looked like.'
'At the risk of prolonging the metaphor, diamonds look like gray pebbles until they're cut.'
'Yeah, and I kept picking up the wrong pebbles. Except there aren't really any wrong pebbles, it all depends on what you want to do with them. If you're going to throw one at a dog, it doesn't have to be a diamond. It all depends on what the moment demands.'
'The moment.' We were close to the door now, and the hard white light bathed Skippy's face like a second- rate special effect in an Old Testament movie. He looked like a tax collector about to be born again, bad casting for Saul of Tarsus.
'Do you have any idea how terrified I used to be in auditions?'
'No,' I said, 'but I would be too.'
'I couldn't look anybody in the eye. I couldn't use my voice, I'd just mumble at the floor. I couldn't find the experiences that would have brought the part to life. I was picking up all the wrong pebbles.'
'Good evening, Mr. Miller,' said a woman at the door whom I'd never seen before. 'Good evening, Mr. Grist. Welcome to your first Revealing.'
Skippy beamed and we filed past. 'Christ,' I said, 'even Japan isn't that efficient.'
'So the thing is,' Skippy continued as we went through the brilliant light, courtesy of half a dozen thousand- watt spots, and through a second door into the auditorium proper, 'the thing is that I didn't realize that everybody- all those casting directors and producers and directors-was in the moment with me and that the moment was in perfect harmony. And I had all my memories and all my experiences with me too.'
We were sloping down an aisle in a large hall that was already mostly full. Looking around, I realized that we hadn't had to hurry; here, as in Orwell, some were more equal than others, although Skippy had missed it. A gray- suited Listener, or something, beckoned us to two seats down front. The stage had more flowers on it than the average gardener sees during the month of May. Bells tintinnabulated over the loudspeakers.
'The thing is,' Skippy said again, 'that there's no reason to be frightened by any situation if you know the moment is in harmony, and especially not if the other people don't know it.' He counted on his fingers to make sure he had his verbs straight and then nodded. 'All you have to do is key into the moment, surf it like a wave. It's all going in one direction. If you try to fight it, like I used to do, you drown. If you paddle too hard, then you get ahead of it, like I also used to do, and you get slammed into the sand. Just sense it and you can glide down its surface, like the surfer and the wave.'
We were sitting, surrounded by people. The bells inspissated in the air. They sounded vaguely Tibetan.
'Swell,' I said. 'What happens if it gets choppy?'
'What's choppy? Everything's choppy. Nobody's ironed time for us to make it all smooth and starchy. A storm is just a succession of moments, and even that's an illusion. There's only one moment, now, and it and the storm are one. Nothing from the past should weigh you down. Nothing in the future should surprise you. It's all one everlasting moment, and you're already in balance with it. Do you think the ocean is surprised by the waves on its surface? All you have to do is let it carry you.'
Skippy laughed just as the lights dimmed. 'You just ride on in,' he said. A couple of people shushed him. When they recognized Skippy, they stopped shushing.
The lights on the stage were tremendous enough to make me wonder what the Church of the Eternal Moment's electrical bills might be. A sober-looking individual in a dark suit welcomed us from behind a bleached pine podium. When he'd finished, a curtain behind him rose soundlessly and a sextet-guitar, piano, and four vocalists-went to work.
Their specialty was rewriting the hits. They started with 'It Only Takes a Moment' and then segued into the Beatles' 'Yesterday,' with some minor reworking of the lyrics. Next to be butchered was the Stones' 'Time Is on My Side,' followed by a version of 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix' that I couldn't follow at all. The general theme, though, was clearly time.
Skippy leaned over to me. 'I've talked to them about the music,' he whispered. 'This isn't the good part.'
'I hope to Christ not. I've heard better in an elevator.'
'Just wait,' Skippy said.
After the music ground to a merciful end and the curtain came down again, consigning the sextet to whatever richly deserved purgatory awaited them, the lights refocused to reveal the dark-suited individual at his place behind the podium. Two ordinary folding chairs had been placed stage center.
'Please compose yourselves,' said the man at the podium as if he were trying to quell an irresistible mob impulse to dance in the aisles. 'Make yourselves ready for the revealing.'
All around me I had the sense of people taking a deep breath and holding it. From stage left a slender woman in her late thirties came out. She was followed by a golden-haired girl with long Alice in Wonderland locks falling around her shoulders. Cradled in the little girl's arms was a tiny gold kitten that matched her hair. The woman went to the podium and adjusted the microphone downward; she was much shorter than the man in the dark suit. The girl went straight to one of the chairs and sat down, facing out, with the kitten in her lap. She twisted one ankle behind the other nervously.
Applause rippled across the now-darkened auditorium.
The woman at the podium raised a hand. 'Hello,' she said into the darkness.
'Hello, Mary Claire,' Skippy said. Skippy and about a thousand other people.
'Angel has an upset stomach tonight,' the woman said into the microphone. 'What can I say? She's a little girl.'
There was a wave of sympathetic laughter. Mary Claire waved it away cheerfully.
'So anyway, nothing may happen. For those of you who have seen Revealings before, and I guess that's most of you, that should be no big deal. You know it doesn't happen every time. For the others, well, we're sorry. This isn't a fast-food restaurant. You can't always get a Big Mac here.'
A few people clapped manfully, but it had a disappointed sound to it.
The little girl clutched the kitten and looked at her mother out of bewildered eyes and then gazed out at the audience. More than anything else she reminded me of a puppy who'd done something wrong but didn't know what it was.
'Poor baby,' I said to Skippy.
'It's rough on her sometimes,' Skippy said, 'but it's worth it.'
'It's worth it to you. What about her?'
'I'd trade places with her in a minute,' he said.
'If I'd had my way,' Mary Claire was saying in her amplified voice, 'we wouldn't have come onto the stage tonight. I'd have put my baby to bed. But she wouldn't let me. There are a lot of people here, she said. Maybe something will happen. Didn't you, Angel?'
