Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(53)
“You know anyone who goes to work at birth?” Gage asked. He checked his watch, glanced at the television again. His mouth hung open. He appeared to be thinking, calculating what he would say next. He refocused on Maureen. “Why give you a number then? You won’t work for at least, what, fifteen years after you’re born. Why is that number assigned at birth?”
“Because it’s our serial number,” Maureen said, shrugging in surrender to Gage’s wisdom. “And Social Security is a scam, a veil or distraction to cover up that fact. It’s how the government controls us. I have seen the light. I thought you wanted to talk about your son?”
“You’re making fun of me,” Gage said. “I don’t mind. Everyone does. In the beginning. We’re conditioned to think a certain way. It’s a strange education; I went through it myself. But you wait, you’ll find yourself thinking about what I said here today. At night. When you’re alone, when you turn on your computer. That’s how it starts. The questions make too much sense to ignore.”
“Mr. Gage,” Maureen said, “do you consider yourself a Sovereign Citizen?” Fuck it, she thought. Why not come right out with it? If he was going to open that door, she figured, she might as well walk through it. She was losing her patience with Gage’s condescending tone. If Detillier and Atkinson wanted finesse in the questioning, they could sit with this tedious bastard their damn selves.
Gage gestured for the waitress to refill his iced tea. He waited until she brought back the glass to speak. Maureen noticed he never looked at her once. Never thanked her.
“Do I consider myself a free man?” Gage said. “Do I consider myself a unique legal and spiritual individual, with human rights and freedoms endowed to me by my Creator and enshrined, at one time in history, into man’s law by the Founding Fathers? Yes, I do.” He fished the lemon from his tea, squeezed every last drop of juice from it. “Do I belong to a specific group whose members answer to that name, or any name? I do not. You can’t be the first person I described and also be the second.” He leaned forward over the table. “You have to choose.”
“Are you familiar with the Watchmen Brigade?” Maureen asked.
“I’ve heard of them.”
“Are you a member?”
“I am a member of the human race,” Gage said. “Everything else is subservience.”
“Do you believe in their cause?”
Gage grinned. “I get the feeling you and I would define their cause very differently. I believe that patriots exist in this country. That they thrive here. They always have. I believe they do their thankless work in the service of freedom in each of our fifty states. I believe there are many more of them than you know, or care to think about.”
He checked his watch, glanced across the room at the television.
“Freedom,” Maureen said. “You like that word. Your kind always do. Your eyes light up when you say it, like a baby shown a brightly colored ball.”
“It’s an important word,” Gage said. “Everybody loves it. Empires tremble at its sound. It belongs to no one kind. It’s Joshua’s trumpet. Unfortunately, only a few people truly understand what it means.”
“I’m gonna guess that you’re one of those people,” Maureen said.
“The great myth of the past one hundred and fifty years is the end of slavery. The War of Northern Aggression was like every war about the expansion of power by the already powerful. It wasn’t about anybody’s freedom. It was about the expansion of slavery.
“Certainly, our national slavery mutated, like a disease, like a virus, hiding itself in order to survive. Growing, changing, always consuming as monsters do—as the government tossed aside its Stone Age weapons of whips and chains and learned to use its great new modern weapons of debt and taxation. You are a tool, Maureen. A faceless machine with a serial number. You’re a car, a computer, a gun with a number used to track your personal history and financial value to the host. You live, you work, you breathe, and you breed to feed the government. You don’t buy a house from the men who built it. You buy it from the bank. You don’t buy a car from the men who built it. You buy it from the bank. Where do you think the bank’s money goes? Up the food chain to the already fat.
“And you, you risk your life every day for this system that devours you, that owns you, that makes you its enforcer. And yet the work you do doesn’t earn you a place to live. No, for that you need to embrace forty years of debt to a billion-dollar company so they can buy whatever politicians make sure the system that enslaves you stays in place. You work like a slave, live like a slave, punish the other slaves, and because they let you dress in the blue colors of the American overseer, you call yourself free.”
Gage checked his watch again. Maureen wondered why he had even come to this meeting. Why had he arranged it? Clearly he had someplace more important to be, and yet she could see he enjoyed unspooling his lecture. A long time had passed, Maureen figured, since he’d had the chance to lay his sermon on the uninitiated, on someone who hadn’t heard every one of his dumb theories a thousand f*cking times. She felt immense gratitude for whomever it was waiting on him. She felt sympathy for the poor bartender in whatever backwoods south Louisiana saloon who had to listen to this shit night in and night out.
“I see the spark of truth in you,” Gage said, restless in his seat. “Every soul comes to the truth from different directions, like the streams to the sea. There is no one way home. You want to let them lie to you, that’s your choice, it’s not like you can stop them, but don’t lie to yourself. That’s the greatest sin. The only prisoner God hates is the one who holds fast to his cell after He has opened the door.”