Conspiracy Theory

1


It was on the eighth of November, one year and some weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that Father Tibor Kasparian received the letter—and realized, without much shock, that he had spent a decade living in a fantasy. Maybe, he thought, sometime in the middle of the afternoon, when his head was pounding so badly that he would have willingly cracked it open on a brick wall, maybe all of America was a fantasy, a kind of Brigadoon, outside space and time, outside reality. Father Ti-bor’s own reality had begun fifty-five years before on the flat dirt floor of a back room in a midwife’s house in Yekevan, Armenia. There were hospitals in Yekevan, and doctors, but his mother hadn’t trusted them. Those were the days before—just before—the Soviet occupation, but she hadn’t trusted them anyway. She hadn’t liked the condescension of the medical staff, who seemed to think women knew nothing about giving birth. She hadn’t liked the soldiers in the street, who belonged to one side or the other, but never hers. Most of all, she had wanted a priest, a real Armenian priest, from an Armenian church, willing to give baptism on the spot just in case the worst decided to happen. All these years later, that was the one thing about his mother that Father Tibor Kasparian had not been able to accept. He could not fully love anyone who thought so little of God as to think that He would send an infant into eternal hellfire simply because it had happened to die before someone had been able to baptize it.

I have become Americanized, he thought—but it didn’t bother him, because he was a little proud of it. Some people grew up wanting to be doctors or lawyers or astronauts or spies. He had grown up wanting to be an American. The first time he had ever risked his life, he had done it to see a movie. It was 1962, and he was fifteen years old. The movie was The Parent Trap, starring Hayley Mills. He had no idea how the two young men who ran the floating American movie concession had gotten hold of their copy. They were students at the university, and people said they were traitors. At least, that’s what they said publicly, but by then everyone knew the doublespeak that went on where the authorities could hear. Patriots were traitors. To be Armenian was to be a traitor. To be anti-Soviet was to be a traitor. To be caught in a cellar watching contraband American movies was to risk jail, or worse. For the two young men whose names he had never known, the result had been worse, in the long run—two years after the night on which he had seen The Parent Trap, Tibor had watched one of them gunned down in the street and the other captured when the police had raided a showing of an Elvis Presley movie called Fun in Acapulco. Hayley Mills, Elvis Presley—it seemed incredible to him now that they could have taken it all so seriously, studying the films as if they were ancient sacred texts, the secret of the universe, the meaning of life. When he’d first come to America for real, many years later, he had made a point of seeing all those movies again. He’d been shocked at how awful most of them were, something that had been masked at his first viewing by the fact that they had been shown in English without subtitles—where were two university students going to find American movies subtitled in Armenian? Or even Russian?—and by the further fact that they had been completely incomprehensible. People talked about culture shock, but they didn’t understand what it meant. He could still see himself in the dark of that small room, sitting next to Anna Bagdanian without the courage to take hold of her hand, wondering in bewilderment why, if the girls were attending the obligatory patriotic training camp, nobody ever sang patriotic songs or marched with flags.

Stupid, he thought now, but not about himself, or even about Hayley Mills and Elvis Presley. He was feeling a little light-headed, and had been, ever since the mail had come at 10:35 this morning. It was now almost six o’clock, and cold for this early in November. Outside the door of the small apartment he lived in behind Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Christian Church, in the little bricked courtyard, wind was blowing leaves and stones into gutters. On any other day, he would have been headed down Cavanaugh Street to the Ararat Restaurant, to meet Bennis Hannaford and Krekor Demarkian for dinner. Tonight, they were on their way to some party a friend of Bennis’s was giving to benefit UNICEF, and he was on his way to do a little business for the church. If the letter hadn’t come, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was only because he knew that he needed advice, and needed it desperately, that he felt so completely at sea. Or maybe not, he thought, irritated at himself, and at everything about himself. He looked around his living room at the stacks of books that lined all the walls and cluttered most of the furniture, at the carpet that he should have replaced a year ago, at the big framed poster of the World Trade Center Twin Towers lit up at night. He did the same things over and over again these days. He saw the same people. He read the same books. He had this small church in his charge, to be pastor of, to celebrate the liturgy in, out in the open, without fear. He had more food in his refrigerator than he would be able to eat in a year. He published his articles about theology in good journals and was asked to conferences to sit on panels with people whose names he had once known only as the authors of banned books. He knew that if he sat down and tried to write out all the things he had wanted when he was still in Yekevan and Anna was still alive and his wife, he would have achieved every single one of them with the exception of a life with Anna herself—but he was sure he had come to terms with that years ago. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know what it was he wanted that he hadn’t wanted a week ago. He only knew that he was suddenly ill at ease, and unhappy in his own skin. The world inside himself felt flat. The world outside himself felt dangerous and deliberate. Maybe reality was something that slept, and now it had woken up.