A Darker Place (24 page)

This time it ought to be easy. Here she was, a New Age seeker faced with an exciting community and hints of an intriguing religious experience. She fit here far better than any of the other four places she had entered. The face she was about to present to Steven Change was close enough to her own to be comfortable, nearly natural.

Yet she was distracted. A bare ten days before she had come into the compound not really caring if she succeeded or not—half wanting, if the truth be told, to fail and prove Glen wrong. Then she had met Dulcie, and her brother, and for some reason as she walked attempting
to picture the face she needed to be, she saw theirs instead. It was disconcerting at first, then annoying. Finally she just threw up her hands and decided the problem must be that she really was too close to being Ana Wakefield, that it was futile to work at constructing something that already existed.

She went to find Steven in his office just inside the entrance to the building that held the kitchen and dining hall. Thomas Mallory was there, too. Ana had consigned Steven’s second in command to the category of Professional Shadow, one of those attracted to leadership but incapable of it. It showed a great deal of sense on Steven’s part not to have given Mallory a permanent Change center of his own; as his temporary leadership in Los Angeles had demonstrated, any place given to him would have fallen apart in a matter of months.

Instead, Mallory accompanied Steven whenever the Change leader left the compound, acting as secretary, calling himself bodyguard (for which role he dressed all in black, wore dark wrap-around sunglasses, and taught a class in karate in the evenings—wearing a black belt). Mallory delighted in stirring up discontent among the other potential shadows, his inferiors in the hierarchy. Ana had spoken to him twice, and thought that he would not recognize her in a lineup. He only glanced at her this time, too, before saying, “He’s on the phone. It’s an important call, and he may be a while.”

She sat down. “I can wait.”

It annoyed him, as she had known it would, although there was not much he could do about it. He hunched his muscular little body over his paperwork, lips pursed tight. She sat and waited.

She could hear the sound of Steven’s voice, though not the words. He seemed to listen a great deal, and contribute only brief phrases, for a long time. Fifteen, twenty minutes crawled by, and though she was careful
to show no impatience, she could feel Mallory’s growing satisfaction in this small vengeance.

Eventually, Steven seemed to have outlasted the speaker on the other end of the line. His answers grew longer, his tones sharper, until one stretch of perhaps three minutes, when he spoke continuously. He stopped, listened, said a few words, went silent again, and finally launched into the truncated rhythm of farewells. Silence fell. After a minute the inner door opened and Steven came out, already speaking to his right-hand man.

“Jonas is getting all worked up about—” He saw Ana and caught himself. “Good morning, Ana.”

“I wanted to have a word with you. I can come back later if this isn’t a good time.” But, damnation, how she wished he had finished that sentence first.

“This is fine,” he said. “Thomas, remind me to give Jonas a ring before dinner, see what’s happened during the day. Come on in. A cup of tea to warm you up after your morning walk?”

“Thank you, that would be nice.” She took a chair in front of the open fire, placed the armful of heavy outerwear on the floor at her side, and planted her sandy hiking boots on the floor in front of her while Steven went over to a small sink-and-electric-kettle kitchen arrangement in the corner. He asked her two or three general questions while waiting for the water to boil, and she gave him general answers while studying the room.

This was a public room, intended for consultations not only with Change members but with outsiders as well. The bookshelves were impressive, their contents generic and little used, with many titles on psychology, educational theory, and the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. The art was a combination of Western landscapes and small sculptures from the East, with a nice bronze
nataraj
taking pride of place above the fireplace. She wondered briefly whether the statue depicting Shiva
dancing amid the flames of the earth’s destruction meant anything to him other than a decorative piece of tourist art.

“Milk?”

“Please,” she said, and reached out for the mug. When she took a sip, she nearly choked: The tea was Earl Grey.

Fortunately, Steven had turned to lower himself into the chair across from her, for he could not have missed her look of shock as Antony Makepeace flitted through her mind and was gone again.

“I’m glad you came to talk with me, Ana. I always like to get to know new members. Teresa tells me you’ve been helping out in the school. What do you think of it?”

“It is impressive. The kids are impressive.”

“Yes. Ironic, considering how grateful society is to get rid of them. We couldn’t have a stronger bunch of kids if we had the entire school system to pick from, rather than a handful of castoffs.”

“You’re allowed some choice, then?”

“Well, in a sense. There are more kids than we could possibly absorb, so we only take those who we feel would most benefit by the structure of Change. I don’t encourage them to send us hard-core drug users, for example. There’re too many peripheral problems with druggies that we’re not equipped to deal with. Have you ever taught special-need kids?”

“Not exclusively, but I worked for a while in a tough urban school where half the kids were nodding in their seats and the others were bouncing off the wall. I didn’t last long, but I sure learned a lot.”

“Why didn’t you last long?”

“I was young. I took it all too personally, couldn’t distance myself enough. The kids were far tougher than I was. I burned out.”

“The kids had no choice but to stay; I imagine that
was the primary difference between you and them. They burned out by retreating into drugs and violence. Like the ones presented to us, ninety percent of whom are brain dead by the age of fifteen.”

“And you take the remaining ten percent?”

“I grab them for the valuable resource they are, kids who have been, as you yourself put it the other day, through the fires of hell—abuse, neglect, violence—and come out toughened. Purified, if you will.”

“Transformed.”

“Precisely.”

“But not easy kids to handle.”

“Give them a goal and a reason to reach for it and they handle themselves.”

Ana thought it was not quite as simple as that, but then, Steven did not work inside the classrooms, and might not realize how much the teachers did.

“It all comes down to Transformation,” she commented, casting around in growing desperation for a lead that would take her to the heart of this conversation.

“Transformation is the only goal that matters,” he replied.

“But do the kids understand that?”

“All of nature understands it. All of nature—rocks, trees, animals, human beings—yearns toward becoming greater, even if only to become the seed of a new generation. It is our duty, as beings somewhat further along in the work, to aid and direct the yearnings of those in our care. Teaching is a sacred occupation, Ana. A great responsibility.”

She took a deep breath. “Is that why I’ve been kept from it? Until I prove myself worthy?”

He studied her over the rim of his cup. “What do you mean?”

She crossed her fingers and launched her shot across his bow, praying fervently that it wasn’t a dud, or
wouldn’t blow up in her face. “I don’t feel a part of the energy here, somehow. Like there’s a secret handshake or something and I don’t have it. Of course, I’d expect that from the people who wear the necklaces, but even the people who have been here only a few weeks are—” She broke off, seeing his expression.

Steven had gone very still. “Who told you about the necklaces?”

“Nobody. Why, what is there to tell? I saw people wearing them and assumed they were a sign of rank.”

“Rank,” he repeated.

“Or accomplishment or time here. Apparently I was wrong.” She allowed a thread of curiosity to creep into her voice.

Steven moved quickly to squelch it.

“No, you weren’t wrong. It’s just that in Change we try to keep any signs of… rank to ourselves. The pendants we wear are meant as a private reminder and acknowledgment of accomplishments, not a badge to be flaunted.”

“Nobody’s flaunted anything, not that I’ve noticed. In fact, I’ve never even seen what’s on the end of the chain, just the chains themselves.”

He looked relieved, then moved to lead her away from the topic. “I’m sorry you feel we are being aloof, Ana. I will speak to some of the members about it. And I also think it’s very probable that Teresa is about to turn her class over to you on a permanent basis.”

“Really? But what about her?”

“Teresa will go back to the administrative job she was doing before she had to fill in, which is more to her taste. She’ll thank you for showing up.”

“Oh. Well, thank you. I’ll enjoy teaching again.”

“And learning?”

“Oh yes. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the possibility of learning.”

“You who have spent all her adult life in the pursuit of learning?”

Ana did not think she was imagining the faint mocking tone in Steven’s voice, nor the tiny quirk in one corner of his mouth. He would allow her to teach children because the school needed her, but unless she did something right now, he would forever see her as yet another middle-aged butterfly flitting from one spiritual flower to the next. She had to be taken seriously, yet without stepping outside her persona. She stared into the depths of the empty mug on her knee as if it would give her the words she so desperately needed to convince him.

“All my life,” she began, “I have been, as you called me the other morning, a seeker. I’ve lived in half a dozen communities, followed the yoga sutras and done
zazen
, learned a little Chinese and a little more Sanskrit, and sat at the feet of any number of men and women who I thought could teach me something. I have never stayed with one discipline because none of them seemed to me complete: I found them either all ritual or all philosophy, negating the body or discounting the mind, either bogged down in their own tradition or else rootless and shallow, and none of them succeeded in integrating everyday life with the search for enlightenment, or Oneness, or revelation.

“Here, I get the feeling that you are trying to do just that. There’s the day-to-day, gritty reality of raising kids and growing food, but not at the expense of nurturing the flame of spirit. Change is a flourishing plant with strong roots deep in the earth. I would like to be a part of that.”

Ana did not look up from her mug. She had thrown out a number of hooks here, from her linguistic background to the use of loaded words like “ritual” and “integrating” to just plain flattery, and she held her breath to see what he would respond to.

“In what way do you see us—how did you put it? ‘Nurturing the flame of spirit’?” he asked.

A wave of relief swept through her—she was right, fire
was
central to the belief system of Change. Perhaps on his trip to India Steven had picked up the Zoroastrian dualism of light and dark, good and—but there was no time for that now. She had to keep the tenuous upper hand, and impress Steven with the potentialities of his new convert. Keep it general; keep it provocative. Ana raised her eyes to look, not at Steven, but at the fireplace.

“The Hindu god of fire is Agni, depicted as a quick and brilliant figure with golden hair. He is young and old, eternal and ephemeral, friendly as a domestic fire and ferocious as the flames of sacrifice. The human spirit is the same—you can see it in those kids. Easily quenched but waiting to be rekindled, flaming out of control but wanting to be brought in to the hearth.”

She could spout this noble bullshit for hours; it was one reason why Anne Waverly was such a popular teacher. That she had not actually answered his question was beside the point, to Steven most of all. His face had gone rapt.

“Have you ever walked through flames, Ana?”

“Do you mean actual flames, as in Nebuchadnezzar casting the three young men into the fiery furnace?”

“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. ‘The hair of their heads was not singed, their mantles were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them.’”

“Well, no.”

“I have, Ana. I went in bare feet across a stretch of burning coals, and I was not harmed. On the contrary, I came out a new man.”

Firewalking, Ana thought—found in cultures as diverse as Polynesia and Greece, and closer to home as well among the New Age.

“I saw it once in the desert outside San Diego,” she told him with enthusiasm. “It was unbelievable.”

“Believe, Ana.”

“Oh, I do believe. Maybe not enough to commit the soles of my feet to it.” She laughed in deprecation of her cowardice; he looked at her with pity.

“Perhaps you will,” Steven said portentously. “Perhaps you will.”

“‘The fire will test what sort of work each one has done,’” she returned, venturing into the New Testament to follow his line from Daniel.

“‘When you walk through fire you will not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.’”

Isaiah, she noted. Then before he could launch off on the burning bush, Elijah’s chariot, or the fiery Day of the Lord, she asked, injecting her voice with earnest solemnity, “That’s what you’re saying happened with the kids here, isn’t it? That they have been through hell already, and some of them were merely hardened.”

“‘Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction,’” he quoted, adding, “like your young friend Jason has been tried.”

Ana kicked herself mentally for assuming that anything she might do would be overlooked by Steven’s eyes and ears. She hoped to God that she wasn’t blushing.

“He’s a fine young man.”

“I agree,” said Steven in his all-knowing voice. “I have great hopes for that boy.”