As I explored these spaces with my companions, I was reminded of Captain Nemo, the genius antagonist of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, plying the oceans in his impossibly large, improbably Victorian electric submarine, the Nautilus, with its library of a thousand books and its museum of fabulous art treasures and its salon with divans and a pipe organ. Jules Verne had written of Captain Nemo that he was a “satanic judge, that veritable archangel of hatred.” The word megalomaniac did not exist in 1870, when the novel was published; it wouldn’t come into use for another two decades. If Nemo and Emmerich shared an unreasonable passion for ludicrously grand constructions, their motives weren’t the same. Nemo was driven mad by loss and grief, by a sense of powerlessness that metastasized into a lust for vengeance and mass murder. Bodie Emmerich had lost nothing, grieved for no one, and had enjoyed great power from his midtwenties. However, he shared with Nemo a talent for hating and a lack of respect for the lives of others; and as Nemo’s narcissism had condemned his crew to drown with him in the depths of the sea, so Emmerich had taken his followers into such depths of isolation that many of those who survived might never belong in the world again.
As we entered the third of the three rooms, we were met by the first conscious resident of the Oasis we’d seen. The encounter didn’t unfold in any way that I would have imagined.
He appeared to be in his midthirties, tan and fit, his hair cropped on the sides but long on top, his smile generous, his teeth as white and even as memorial stones in a military graveyard. His eyes were as blue-green as tropical waters but as cold as an arctic current. He wore white sneakers but no socks, roomy pale-blue pants of wrinkled linen with a drawstring waist, and a white T-shirt that revealed biceps developed through much suffering with heavy weights.
“Hey, guys!” He sprang up from an armchair and tossed aside a magazine. “Welcome to the Oasis, where the only rule is there are no rules. The Light is the Way, and the Way is the one path, and the path goes anywhere you want it to go.” He dropped to one knee and made a come-to-me gesture with one hand. “Hey, pooch, be a pal, gimme some fur.” Winston was having none of it and stayed beside Bridget.
She said, “He’s my therapy dog, trained to stay at my side so that I can deal with my anxiety.”
As supple as a mime who had trained every joint and muscle in his body so he would be able to sway convincingly in a nonexistent wind, the greeter swanned up to his full height. “Hey, that’s cool, that’s sweet, I’m down with that. A few other visitors have come with dogs. There are no rules about dogs, about anything. You can bring a dog for any reason, any reason at all if the Light invites you. In any case, whether you come here alone or in a group, with a dog or not, when you leave, your anima and animus will be perfectly aligned on both sides of your axis, perfectly aligned. I’m Soul Timothy, here to be sure you get everything you want. I didn’t know we had guests. We don’t get them as often as we used to. Hey, you know not to tell me your names, right? Make up a name or go without one, whatever works for you. If I don’t know it, I can’t remember it, and if I can’t remember it, that’s as good as if you were never here. Our real names are unknown to us anyway until we receive them on the day of the Singularity. Do you like your suites? The guest suites are fabulous, aren’t they? Anything you want can be brought to your room, and you’ll sleep well because the soundproofing is crazy. Somebody could be screaming in the suite next door, you’d never hear it. Now what can I get for you? What do you need, want, yearn for? What do the ignorant Moujiks deny you in the dying world outside?”
Soul Timothy was as eager to please as a puppy, a puppy on five milligrams of Benzedrine. I’d more or less expected Emmerich’s soul children to be frail husks, pale denizens of their underworld, eyes glazed, as programmed as ants in a colony, though less industrious. Maybe most of them were like that. Maybe Tim was the social director on this earth-locked cruise ship, schooled to be enthusiastic while equating enthusiasm with verbosity.
Because Soul Timothy clearly focused his attention more on women than on men, Panthea saw an opportunity to gather information by playing the eager tourist fascinated by the minutiae of local customs. “This is our first invitation to the Oasis. Do all the others here—What do you call them?—do they sleep throughout the day as Bodie does?”
“They’re my soul siblings,” Tim said. “We’re children of the Light by virtue of being enlightened by him. Because of him, we’ve found within ourselves the power we didn’t know was there, the total freedom that was always ours but that the repressed and repressive Moujiks stifled in the dying world outside. We’re born for the wild night, in need of no light but his, as we await the Singularity.” He said all that with a solemn expression, with a rote delivery, as if reciting a portion of some catechism. Then he smiled broadly again and continued with his former emotional zeal. “Yes, we stay to our rooms during the day, resting for the rapture of the later hours. But we don’t sleep throughout every moment of the sun’s domination. We eat. We groom ourselves. We exercise, read what is approved to read, meditate, prepare ourselves to satisfy and be satisfied as our mood moves us. When visitors come, we’re here for you. Every minute for you. Gee, guys, what’s wrong with me, letting you stand there? Sit, sit, let’s relax together. Since this is your first time—How exciting that must be!—you’ll have a lot of questions. I’m your answer man on duty today. Sit, sit.”