The Conspiracy of Virtue

 

Human happiness experts say that it is unlucky to be declared a child prodigy.  This is particularly true with respect to musically gifted children.  At an early age, children with special talent for musical performance are groomed for the concert hall.  They earn accolades on school stages and, later, attend expensive, and prestigious, conservatories of music – Oberlin, for instance, or Eastman or Juilliard.  The entire system of education conspires to make child prodigies of this sort feel special, privileged, and unique.  Yet, the dirty little secret is that there are hundreds of thousands of musically gifted people ultimately vying for a few hundred jobs with symphony or opera orchestras.  And very few are sufficiently charismatic to become solo concert performers.  Therefore, initial acclamation as a child prodigy leads only to a life of disappointment.  Most child prodigies end their careers teaching High School band or playing on weekends with a local ensemble rehearsing for one, or, at most, two concerts a year – perhaps, the Fourth of July and Christmas.  Suburban church choirs are full of people who once imagined that they would tread the boards of Carnegie Hall. The glittering dreams of youth simply wilt away and, unless the ex-child prodigy is firmly grounded in reality and well-balanced, dashed expectations may lead to sadness and, even, despair.

Something similar is true of kids who have mastered the guitar, garage-band drummers, amateur cartoonists and artists, and, even, writers.  Many are encouraged, and, even, encouraged lavishly, but very few will manage to make a career of their avocation.  The world is full of talented people who showed great promise when they were young but never accomplished much of anything later in life.  Indeed, most of us will never accomplish anything worth mentioning.

Goodman was told that he was a brilliant writer when he was a boy.  In third grade, he wrote a little poem called “The Gratuitous Centipede.”  Actually, Goodman’s mother, who taught singing at the Catholic School (although she was Lutheran), helped her little son with the rhymes and supplied some of the big words that adorned the verse.  Goodman’s father, who was a lawyer, made photocopies of pictures showing centipedes to decorate the little chap-book.  Everyone was very impressed and Goodman was told that he was gifted and that great things were expected from him.

For a few years, Goodman wrote short stories and several of them were published, first in the High School literary magazine and, then, in the fiction supplement to the weekly newspaper at the college that he attended.  Goodman won several prizes for his short fiction and, for a while, thought that he was sufficiently talented to become a professional writer.  But the stories that he sent away to periodicals that printed fiction were always rejected.  He tried to find a literary agent to help him, but no one was interested.  Goodman flattered a novelist who taught at a local college by sending him notes praising his writing and attending the writer’s readings at bookstores downtown.  After several years of blandishments of this sort, Goodman persuaded the novelist to read several of his stories.  The novelist sent him a letter advising that he thought Goodman’s stories were worthless, although they were written in serviceable prose.  The novelist suggested that Goodman enroll in a M.F.A. program at the University if he wished to pursue this work.  But, by this time, Goodman was employed as a real estate agent and had a family to support and, so, he was unable to continue his education as a writer.  Nonetheless, he devoted a couple of hours each weekend to his prose and, over a number of years, wrote several hundred short stories.

Most of Goodman’s stories were inconsequential and, after he had written them, he could scarcely recall their content.  Every two or three years, he gathered together the stories that he deemed best and self-published them using a computer program available through Amazon.  One of the members of a creative writing group to which he belonged owned a small bookstore in the suburb where he lived.  Goodman consigned a half dozen of his books to that bookstore and, sometimes, people purchased them.  The owner of the bookstore reported the sales to Goodman and wrote him small checks and, even, asked him to replenish the inventory of books when it ran low.  Over thirty years, Goodman self-published four volumes of short stories.  He estimated that he sold about ten to twelve books a year.  He sent copies of his books to friends in lieu of Christmas cards and, even, sometimes gave volumes to his real estate clients.  This was the extent of Goodman’s literary activities.  By the time, he was sixty, it was pretty clear that someone (or some several) had played a mean trick on Goodman, arousing desires in him that would never be satisfied.

One afternoon in November, Goodman took a house-key from the cubby hole in his office and drove to a lonely home on the edge of town. The day was dreary with a dull, lightless drizzle darkening the sky and the roadways.  The house was just outside the city limits and, therefore, not connected to City sewer and water.  Goodman noted the wet, glistening mound of the septic field sepulchral in the home’s backyard.  There was a damaged picket fence around the property overgrown with nettles and a metal stake to which some long dead dog had been tethered.  The neighborhood was not zoned and a couple of small manufacturing businesses in metal sheds stood along the alley that led to the for-sale house.  A railroad siding built on a low weedy embankment looped among the forlorn-looking dwellings.  On the State Highway, a bowling alley showed some neon against the dying day and, on the facade there was shapely white pin, a bit like a maiden doomed to the Underworld and half as tall as a church steeple.  A hundred yards down the road, an old barn was occupied by the local Alanon club and there was a field dotted with metal posts where a Drive-In Movie Theater had once been located.  The abandoned projection booth, a squat bunker of concrete blocks, stood in the field grooved with puddles where cars had once parked.  

Goodman wasn’t representing the property.  He was showing the place as a favor for a friend in the business who was at the Clinic undergoing chemotherapy.  (Goodman was used to work with more expensive, high-end real estate.)  The prospective purchasers were ahead of him, parked in the gravel driveway, under the eaves of the house. Goodman pulled next to the black SUV and saw that it had tinted windows.  He got out of his Cadillac and the couple who had asked to tour the home emerged from their vehicle.  Goodman shook their hands and, with the key, he let them into the house.

The place was shadowy inside.  The ceiling lights didn’t seem equal to the later afternoon gloom.  The rooms were stark and bare and the floors were very cold.  The windows showed grim theorems of fractured trees and empty lots.  The steps to the upstairs creaked loudly.  The woman prospect remarked that the closets were very small.  The carpets in the upstairs bedrooms had been recently shampooed and there was a sour reek in those chambers.  Goodman pointed out that the bathroom on the second floor had been recently remodeled.  The woman turned on the faucet and inspected the flow of water.  There was air in the pipes and faucet coughed.  

They went downstairs and looked at the kitchen again.  The microwave was new as was the dishwasher.  Goodman wasn’t enthusiastic about descending into the basement – that was where the bodies had been found.  But he opened the wooden door, inhaled deeply, and, then, led them down the steps into the old cellar.  The walls were piles of fieldstone grouted together and there were several ancient posts supporting the floor above them.  

“Is it dry?” the man asked.  

Goodman said that he wasn’t certain since it wasn’t his listing.  He asked if the couple had received the disclosure form.  They said that they had read that document.  Goodman looked at the walls and cement floor with its eye-shaped drain.  “It looks dry,” he said.  The air smelled musty but not foul.

A mud-room with an inclined roof was attached to the house.  It was quite cold in the mudroom and Goodman could see his breath flickering under his nose.  A small table with a formica top stood against the wall and there were four chairs.  The man asked if the price was firm or negotiable.  “I don’t exactly know,” Goodman said.  “But generally you can negotiate.  Make an offer and we will see what the owner thinks.”  The man removed a pad from his breast pocket and wrote a figure on a sheet of paper that he tore out and handed to Goodman.  “Why don’t you initial the proposal?” Goodman said, sliding the note back to the man.  The woman pretended to look out the window.  The man put his initials on the note and Goodman slipped it into his wallet.

“Are you a writer?” the woman asked.  

“Sort of,” Goodman replied.

“Have you published much?” the man asked.

“Very little.”

“You know,” the woman said, “we were very impressed by one of your short stories.”

“Really?” Goodman said.  “I’ve never met someone that I didn’t know who had read one of my stories.”

The man nodded: “I think it was called something like ‘The Conspiracy of Virtue’.”

“I know I wrote a story with that name,” Goodman said.  “But I can’t recall it very well.  That was almost twenty years ago.”

The woman said: “That’s right.  It was a long time ago.  We were passing through this area and stopped at the bookstore across from the strip mall and...”

“That’s where we acquired the book of stories,” the man continued.

“I don’t remember that story very well,” Goodman said.  “I have written so many stories.”

“We liked it a lot,” the man said.

They went outside.  The drizzle continued and the old house’s eaves and down spouts made a faint sound like a flute being played.  Goodman said he would convey the proposal to the agent representing the home’s owner.  “I hope we can do business,” he said to the couple.  “I hope so too,” the woman replied.

Goodman went home and found a copy of his short story collection in which “The Conspiracy of Virtue” was printed.  (He had several boxes of unsold books in his basement.)  He had written the story under the influence of short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges.  In the story, a man discovers that the world is sustained by a secret league of righteous men and women.  The story’s hero comes to believe that he is one of the forty Just whose virtue upholds human existence.  Goodman thought the story was competently written but without much conflict or drama.  Once the premise was established, there wasn’t much that could be done with it.  Goodman admired the subtle suggestion embedded in the story that the hero was, perhaps, mentally ill, even, maybe, a paranoid schizophrenic.  It seemed to him highly implausible that anyone would have much admired the tale, let alone remembered it for many years.        

An infection complicated the listing realtor’s chemotherapy and Goodman again went to meet the prospective buyers at the house at the edge of town.  Snow was falling in wet pellets and its weight made the home’s eaves sag.  In the icy white wind, the house almost disappeared, an apparition in its shell of broken, leafless trees.  Goodman unlocked the door but didn’t want to wait in the house and, so, he sat in his vehicle.  The buyers’ black SUV rolled silently down the lane and parked next to him.

They went inside and sat at the cold formica table in the mud-room.  The woman handed Goodman an earnest money check written to the sick realtor and marked in the memo line with the address of the property.  The man said that there were some specific features of the dwelling that he wanted to research.  “Go ahead,” Goodman said.  “Look to your heart’s content.”

The man removed his shoes to avoid tracking water into the home and, then, went inside.  

The woman looked at Goodman fixedly, as if she were trying to evaluate some subtle quality in him.  

“Did you look up your story?” she asked.

Goodman nodded his head.  

“Of course, you just reversed things,” she said.  “But the details are all accurate.  It would be a pretty bad breach if you hadn’t turned things upside-down and ass-backward.”

“It’s just a story... fiction,” Goodman said.  “I can’t recall exactly where I got the idea.  Maybe, some other writer.”

“That’s nonsense,” the woman replied.  “You know as well as I.”

“In fact, I don’t.”

Goodman heard doors in the house opening and closing.  Water ran under a sink faucet.

 “Well, how do you explain the details?

“What details?”  Goodman asked her.

“Of course, we are thirty, not forty, but the concept is the same,” she said.  “And you’ve got the objective reversed.  You say it’s for the Good, but, of course, we know the opposite.  But otherwise...”

“I just made it up.”

“Well, people are wrong when they say that there’s no such thing as evil,” she said.  “The idea that evil is just an error, missing the mark so to speak –that’s completely wrong, although, I suppose, the concept serves us.”

“Us?” Goodman asked.  “Who is us?”

“Who are you?  Is that what you mean?”

“I invented a short story and you’re acting as if it states some sort of truth,” Goodman said.

“You know,” she said, “the intent has to be accomplished.  It has to be performed.  You can’t just rest quietly waiting for it to happen.”

“It’s impossible for someone to desire evil,” Goodman said.  “That’s why the story is about the league of virtue.”

“Evil is our good,” the woman said.  “And you have to work every day, every minute to accomplish it.”

Goodman heard the man’s steps approaching inside the house.

“Don’t be obtuse,” the woman said.  “You know what I’m talking about.  We sought you out because you revealed our secrets.  And you can’t reveal those things unless you’re one of us.  Otherwise, how would you know?”

“This is crazy,” Goodman said.

“Can you think of anything good or virtuous or, even, slightly, helpful that you’ve ever accomplished in your life?”

“My mind doesn’t work that way,” Goodman told her.

“Of course,” she said.  “Of course, it doesn’t.  That shows, you’re part of the conspiracy that upholds all that is bad in the world.”

“That’s nonsense,” Goodman said.

“You wrote it.  You put it on paper.  Just upside down,” she replied.

The man stood in the door frame, on the threshold between the mud-room and the living room in the house.  The wooden frame around him made the man seem immense, as big as the house, as big as the world.

“So is your conference complete?” the man asked.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“Do you understand?” the man asked Goodman.

“I don’t,” he said.

“All your...what do you call it?”

“Writing?” Goodman said.

“Your... scribbling,” the man said.  “That’s the sign of the harm that you’ve done.”

Goodman shook his head.  

“You have to labor hard to pervert things,” the man said.  “And, you’re certainly, nothing if not assiduous in your efforts.”

“We’ve seen what we want to see,” the woman told Goodman.

They rose and went outside into the snow.  Goodman locked the house behind them.  

He delivered the earnest money check to the sick agent.  The man’s face was waxy and his clothing slouched on him as if he were just skin and bones.

“What are the buyers like?” the sick man asked.

“Nuts,” Goodman said.  “Delusional.”

“Do you think it’s just morbid interest?” the agent asked.

“I don’t know – ‘morbid’. That’s the least of it,” Goodman said.  He flushed and his ears were burning a little.  He didn’t know why he was suddenly so ashamed. 

Of course, the check bounced.