Pirsig's Pursuit of an NRM

Jock was pacing frantic up and down when the news hit him; news that greatly displeased him, it staggered him. The reports were that Rudy had given him a choice between retracting everything he said about Claiborne and a nominal punishment, or holding steadfast to his opinions about her and facing annihilation. The dilemma appeared that even if Jock had molested a fellow member, and likened himself to the next leader, and that even if he was removed from the Sanctihus his potential infraction could never be set aside. The director would still hold onto him as a cult member.

Several times before, he had apprehended Jock aggressively: whilst reading to younger  people and instigating rebellious ideas and whilst publicly criticizing those rated inferior by general consensus, slagging off unfortunate specimens such as Claiborne because she was immature and a bambi-specimen and with a limited appeal to the “righteous cult”.

The director, who used to search for misdemeanors of less note discovered him skipping routine workouts and locking bicycles to lamp posts for a joke, but Jock was ready to oblige, to show himself so friendly, polite and self-effacing that they tended to acquit him, so as to skirt round a vague problem.

This time, Claiborne moped around as she used to do most mornings in the resting rooms at the base at eleven o’ clock during break between other breaks. She was tired but went prowling in Geneva with her friend Volley who kept herself to herself reading, drinking tea, sharing gossip until they had to go back to the NRM Sanctihus.

 Suddenly, without any notice, an familiar voice hailed her cheerlessly as she progressed down a corridor. The voice at the end of the hallway belonged to Volley’s friend Jock, from outside the cult who Claiborne had formed an attachment to at a party in the anodyne days of cult splendour, and she approached him enthusiastically, like most of her peers, with her arms outstretched ready for a close embrace. Cl aiborne and Jock paused: he was older than Claiborne in neither his manner, his appearance, nor did he now appear even slightly awestruck or slightly bashful.

Concealing that feeling, Claiborne told Volley in no uncertain terms they ought to try to escape to the newspaper vendor in haste to stop any squares reproving her for allowing a visitor without anyone’s permission. Minutes later, she glimpsed Naomi casting a jealously critical eye just briefly. She barely noticed but she absorbed magnanimously the resentment therein:

“Let’s go in here. We can have a fag or whatever.” She said.

“What! Just a fag? You want just a fag?” He said this sounding similar to the genie who offers all gifts to you, but mostly at an inconvenient and momentous cost. They exited the platform forecourt suddenly after that, as it was not salubrious and not very conducive to romantic habits, or anything else.

“Yuck. This place is disgusting” he joked. “Quick, in here.” She nervously hurried to the nearest table and, in seconds, they had made the world's troubles seem a long way in front of them.

He terrified her. He was a huge amount older and what was worse he seemed nicer than before. So nice in fact she was on the point of falling out with the cult, and head over heels in love there on the spot.

“What’s the matter? You look uncomfortable?” he said in a solicitous and tender way.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just I haven’t seen you for a while. It’s a bit odd for me to have you rolling up unannounced.” Claiborne kicked herself lightly, and bit her lips in anguish: here in Geneva she heard herself talking like the angst-ridden teenager, exactly what she tried her hardest to cover up. There was so much strength in the feelings the man put inside her weak mental frame. Then they began to have a wonderful conversation...

 It went in and out of subjects, around and under and over until Claiborne knew they had spoken of almost everything for the last six hours. At the very least three hours. For in a lovelorn state, it seemed twenty seconds, and in terms of their soul-linking up to two days.

Claiborne was in a state known as bliss with regards to any misfortune, and yet it could all shatter suddenly if one of her cult mates heard them speaking that truthfully to one another. If they wanted to use that to start a grudge match against what she had uncovered of thrilling experiences, when their lives, on the other hand, were so mundane and so petty so be it.

She was more powerful than him. Not realising this to be virtually criminal she tried to tone it down so the authorities would not see it as a fault of hers; the crime of overarching and worthless pantheism. The illusory and mysterious Jock, before he left her alone again said he did not want to give her the latest news which he warned her would displease and dishearten her, yet was something she must know:

“I know I have got it now and…and I want to die. Will you help me?”

“What do you mean?” Claiborne asked, shocked, bewildered, frightened and searching for ways to dissuade him from any such topic. He had no intention of letting her hurt him, and when he refused to allow himself to be talked out of commiting suicide she saw with dismay and implicit sympathy the invisible damp tear course down his cheek and chin.

“I beg you. You’re the only one that can help.” he said.

“I’m sorry, there are many things which I would gladly do for you but you said you weren’t even 100% sure you have Aids.” She said.

“Well I am sure so…” He produced a short knife from somewhere. Then he told her that it wouldn’t hurt him as he was prepared and he would always be ill to her, nothing but that which she could do with the dagger would help him.

“There’s no way I’m doing this, the cops would call it murder!” Claiborne went on to ask the usual serious questions: if he had had a test, how he got it and whether it was painful at the moment. They had talked for nigh on an hour in the cafe about the Christmas holidays before, and about Jock’s many girlfriends. He had six or so continuously apparently, and was not planning to wait until he was sixty to decide which of them had wanted to spend the remainder of her life in prison for this deed. He liked the idea one of them used him or deceived him, but Claiborne was already freaked out by him, and all the members of the cult knew he did take that stuff, heroin, or most of them knew anyway.

At this juncture the gate opened and a voice laughing and some loud uncouth movements became noticeable. His lowlife friend Volley, playing silly games, pretending to be fighting over nothing. Sniffing the air with his nostrils up in the air like a rodent Volley caught a whiff of the plume of smoke and breaking off his playtime turned around to witness Jock banging his head noisily on the gate to the platform, for a whole ten minutes.

However, he flung an idle threat that he had told the director of the cult, last time he saw him about the illicit shenanigans that were going on behind in her head.

Claiborne was placated fully, so she sounded none of the alarms at the impending likelihood of the angry leader’s punishments, and for good measure Jock shunted her outside of her mundane realms of experience as regards her acquaintance’s bizarre request for euthanasia. Claiborne, with her current brown spiked hairstyle morphed into someone all the more dubious when she heard these intense pressures and knew full well she had to get out in there at that very instant.

Really trying to approach them quietly and without making a massive scene there she excused herself as rudely and as crudely as she possibly could and made her way without conveying any impression of utter hate to the very cult whose implicit anger she still thought they felt so much.

“Okay, I’ll see you later” came the sullen and morose reply from Claiborne which suggested that such depression and such severe dejection no amount of consolation from her (or anyone else) was going to alleviate.

Nobody else had the wherewithal for this to help lift the mood. Claiborne’s brain stayed at dizzying heights; nor did she really want to remain asleep another moment. What she wanted was to wake up and stay awake all the day, to avoid absorbing this strange concatenation of events.

When, after nearly two hours of silence she could not give the cult the gift of an excuse for her alert and worried condition the astonishment was beyond categorization and beyond belief, and they said they felt as if they were being treated like dirt.

 Before Claiborne had fallen asleep that night she went to the train station cafe, like the day before, urgently. While recouping her strength there, as some strangers were inside, she listened with great care. Several minutes went by during which she matched the voices to those of somebody in the cult. What is more it was in an unfamiliar form of dialect, talking and whispering; although she had no idea why it deeply unsettled her mind. She knew  full well that at the station everyone talked like this.

Next on the menu was to go inside and see with her own eyes who, or what, these strangers were who had caused the commotion. Gradually, on the other side of the door the voice grew hotter and less subdued as if they knew.

In spite of that, as soon as Claiborne set foot inside the door of the cafe the orators started mauling her with unexplained, but expected force. She panicked and it became obvious no excuse, apology, or amount of ignorance would make her able to stop them, her alone. What she saw for herself was that they were expressing, as would doting fathers, their desire to cadaver, attack, and denigrate the person she had been seen with in the cafe earlier the same day.

Caliborne never managed to call on her friends Naomi, and Lauren, who she had phoned up earlier. She hadn't used all the means at her disposal to try that day, outside the station, to reach a mutually agreeable understanding, or a form of deal with these bad-natured and temperamental associates of that sweety of a man, Volley, possibly sent by Jock or Rudy who had probably not contracted Aids and wanted to kill her.

Once she had seen that the NRM ought to be called in Claiborne knew there was something else for her to do: to try, with as much alacrity as possible, to make her departure from that pernicious situation as quickly as possible.

She ran for it. Despite not rating her chances as highly as usually, and despite knowing she should not have many and various options left at her disposal she made for the doors to the outside.

The NRM members let go of her thin arms, having tried their worst to pull her backward from the old café forecourt. This fell short of its aim however, as luck would have it. She availed herself of most of her dissipating strength to stand up on her own two feet in the familiar territory of the train station platform. It would have made quite an inornate picture; however, there was no-one around to draw a Bosch-style painting of her miniature, bantam immovable figure looming on a horizon.

Such a celebration that speeding away across a block and a half to the bookshop which was a customary place of danger but was now a place of safety and refuge, she was soon going to hide and no longer be under danger of arrest from the the cult members themselves.

She looked ahead. In front of her the bonne-adroit was just within sight – no longer could she hear Jock’s squawks echoing from some unidentifiable dark corner or other. It was a lot farther to go until she would really be unsafe, within Jock's reach and when she passed through the heavy, half-shut gateway outside she sped up almost to a run and stopped stooping on her knees, running breathless and panting. So, withoutregaining her composure and not pausing for breath, she did not take stock and could not make a plan that would be sufficient.

“Where can I go now? Until now everything in my life has been like a Stephen King book. Now it’s suddenly turned into Jackanory. What can I do? I’m obviously with him and who’ll disbelieve my side of the story?” she said.

With such gloomy ruminations Claiborne knew why it would take much less than a few years to recover her former pride. She wished with all her palpitating heart she could become less of a heroic and responsible teenager, at once. Impossible, she should have thought laterally about an escape from the quandary she now found herself immersed in, as opposed to the side-effects, the lonely "arising" from the heroin and the two sightings of her loverboy in one morning.

Then, sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of shame, guilt and self-torture she drew attentive gasps from other travellers, completely aware of the reason for her plight. Not blind to the anger imprinted on her tender face, before she got back to the maisonette, like a stamp of necessity the travellers asked each other what the hell mattered so much? She considered her life to be dangerous? Springing from some evil quarter? But telling her could offer no real way out or assistance before the scandal had taken place.

Off she went to the previous stage in her busman's trip or holiday from reality, the arising, and wishing it was so she began to scream to herself how powerful she was and how the force of her innate soul had to be reckoned with in order for Volley to ward off the supernatural love for him which was so clearly hurtling towards her, chasing her and pushing her in the wrong directions. By this she meant the cult, in hot pursuit, seeking to stop her doing anything foolish.

   THE   BEGINNING !