The Astral (20 page)

“Cults are mostly about power,” said Emery. I adjusted my ears to the sudden drop in vocal timbre and conversational speed. “They might start with all good intentions, but like they say, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, whether it’s Hitler or the pope or Kirsty McDevitt from Salt Lake City. Now she’s gone into hyperdrive. Her followers are a means to an end for her, and the end has no limit. And also, of course, it’s about money. The leader or leaders get rich off their followers while preaching poverty and humility. And this is where Hector is now, working fourteen-hour days that begin and end with two-hour prayer meetings.”

“I remember those from when we were in her last group,” said June. “They’re horrible! We were called upon to expose anyone who’d expressed doubts or failed to uphold doctrine. The punishment was harsh. You had to repent and confess over and over until you were purged. You’d think everyone would just leave, but they’re scared to. It’s drummed into your head that terrible things will happen to deserters. Things like being hit by a truck or going insane or dying of cancer or turning homosexual. People really believe this.”

It sounded a bit like my marriage, I thought with mordant humor. It had operated along the lines of a two-person version of this group dynamic. It had started with love bombing, the promise of utopia; once I’d convinced her to marry me, Luz had flat-out adored me. She told me I was a genius, cooked for me, praised my work, supported me during the years when I wasn’t bringing in my share of the money, which was most years. And I was complicit in this mollycoddling. I turned passive, defenseless, soft. My identity became fused with my wife’s. Without even realizing it, little by little, I gave up my free will, my autonomy, my ability to act without considering what she wanted and needed.

When I really fucked up, after my peccadillo with Samantha, Luz knocked me off my pedestal and turned the klieg lights of her ice-cold gaze onto every bit of evidence, any minuscule contradiction or microscopic disparity she could uncover, building her case to prove that I was a lying, cheating worm. Of course, anyone might look like a worm if an obsessed, hell-bent prosecutor lifted up enough rocks. But no matter, Luz had split me open with her fascistic scimitar, then she’d flayed me with the wet noodles of my own guilt. James had suffered the same fate from Lisa. That was marriage, sometimes. Wives got their husbands under control and kept them there. That was how they operated, these possessive, manipulative, needy, controlling women, they pretended to be soft and vulnerable, sweet and loving, and we, big dumb dogs that we were, fell for their cooing flattery and breasty softness, tried to be the heroes they wanted us to be, to live up to their expectations. And when we failed and our wives lashed out, we skulked around, tails between legs, hangdog and furtive, doing their bidding until they forgave us, if they did. Now it was happening to my son. Christa was calling him the new Messiah, worshipping his purity of spirit, bending him to her will with flattery, seduction, and praise. But the instant he crossed her, she would destroy him.

But not all women were like that—Marion was something of a dog herself. But alas, I was not in love with Marion and never had been.

“We were among the first members of the Taos cult,” Emery was saying, “so we were in the inner circle. We saw and heard things the others didn’t know, the hidden doctrines.”

“That’s right,” June said. “Hidden doctrines, those are important. That’s the main way that cults differ from religions.”

“That’s what I was saying, Dad,” Karina said. “Remember?”

“With religions,” said June, “you know what you’re getting into from the get-go, it’s all laid out. Even a lot of fringe fundamentalist groups, like say Mormons or Hasidism, they tell you up front what they’re about. With cults, they only show you what they want you to see until you’re sucked in and under mind control, and then they reveal the rest of it on a need-to-know basis to keep you on your toes, as a means of wielding power. Hidden doctrines. That’s Kirsty’s stock in trade.”

“And now here she is again,” said Emery, “up to her same old tricks.”

“I just don’t like the sound of these three messiah tests Hector has to pass,” said Karina. “What the hell are they? Do you know? It sounds so kooky and stupid, like some kids’ game.”

June set her teacup on the coaster on the lace doily on the table at her elbow. That arrangement—coaster, doily—brought back my mother’s homemade crocheted lace cloths, which she’d draped over everything, tables and the arms and backs of chairs and couches, and you had to use a coaster or a napkin on top of them or you’d spoil them. I hadn’t seen a crocheted doily, runner, or antimacassar in so long, I had forgotten all about them. They were a gladsome sight to me now. They soothed and buoyed me.

“The ex-member we just rescued, Jennifer,” June was saying, “told us they were devising these tests when she left the group. This was a couple of weeks ago. She said she wasn’t sure, but one of them might involve walking on water.”

“Oh well then,” I said, going for jocularity to quell a rising sense of alarm for my son. “He’s not the Messiah. He can’t even swim.”

“How did you help Jennifer get out?” Karina asked. “How do you plan to get Hector out?”

“An intervention,” said Emery, “isn’t kidnapping and reprogramming anymore. Those old tactics just replaced one form of mind control with another. Nowadays, cult interventions are entirely voluntary. What happens is, we have to manage to get Hector to a safe place. Somewhere isolated and self-contained, where he can’t easily leave. Like a cabin in the mountains, say you invite him on a family camping trip. Members are still permitted to leave for short visits with their families. We could also use a place here in the city, but that’s much trickier, because when things get gnarly, which they always do in these situations, he’s got to stick with it through the hard part, when he starts to realize the truth about this group and himself and what he’s been going through there.”

“Emery means,” said June, “that it’s for his own protection to isolate him with us. Now, it all happens with his full cooperation, so there’s no coercion or trickery whatsoever. You sit him down, Harry, and say, ‘Son, we’ve heard some things about Christa’s group that are really scaring us, and we’re very concerned about you. We would love for you to hear these things from the people who told us. Then you can reassure us, if they’re not true, so we can stop worrying about you. Would you be willing to have this conversation?’ If he says yes, then Emery and I and Jennifer and the other two ex-members, Toby and Sylvia, come into the room and sit down and the intervention begins.”

“What if he says no?” I asked. “Knowing Hector, he very well might.”

“Then you keep at him,” said June. “Don’t be afraid to be persistent. Rephrase the question. Ask him what he has to lose. Tell him you’ve heard that Christa used to be a stripper or even a prostitute, for example, and that she’s been in prison for embezzlement, and that you’ve heard her group is a cult. Tell him those things and show him how much concern this causes you because you love him so much. Eventually, even if it’s just out of a need to prove he’s right, it’s likely he’ll agree to talk to us.”

“And then what?”

“And then we tell him about our experiences with Christa when she was Isis. The whole story. Show him the news clippings, give him some transcripts from the trial. We’ll explain how mind control works, how we all got sucked in, and how we got out, and what we know now. It generally takes many hours of intense talking. Interventions can last a couple, three days. They can be powerfully emotional for everyone involved. Often, all sorts of things come out within families. But the important thing is to stay connected, stay with him, not to give up at any point, to keep telling him the truth until he’s really heard it, until he can’t deny it anymore. And then, once he has all the information, he can make his own decision.”

“Maybe he’ll decide to stay anyway,” I said.

“Some people do return to the group after an intervention,” said Emery, “but their conscious, real selves remember everything they’ve heard. Hearing what we have to say sets up something called cognitive dissonance that causes the two selves to be at war, the cult self and the true self, in a way that’s not sustainable for long. We’ll just have to be patient if he goes back and trust that eventually he won’t be able to reconcile what he knows with what he’s forced to do there.”

Ah, I thought. My old friend cognitive dissonance, the discomfort caused by trying to hold two contradictory ideas in the brain simultaneously; I knew it well. In fanatical thinking, in my son’s belief system, one self had to be squelched at all times; there was no reconciliation or even tolerable coexistence for the two. One of them had to die: cult self or real self, Bard or Hector, believer or doubter. He was caught in this unwinnable battle to kill half of himself, paralyzed by failure. “Without contraries there is no progression,” Blake wrote in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. I would have added that without contraries there was no poetry. Writing was the only place I had ever found where my two disparate selves could coexist, where I was afforded the illusion of being integrated, where the part of me that wanted to be a good, decent, responsible man and the part of me that was hell-bent on selfish immersion in mindless animal pleasure met and shimmered in dissonant grace together on the page. I could fuck other women and be faithful to my wife. My horndog self could possess their thighs, their tangy folds and clefts, their pillowy buttocks, all day, and then my good self could lie in near-perfect monogamous slumber next to my wedded spouse all night. I had thought I could get away with this, have my cake and almost eat it, too. I had also believed that my wife truly loved me. I had been as happy trying to balance these simultaneous, irreconcilable poetic and domestic illusions as I had ever been in my life.

“Let’s hope Hector’s real self is strong enough to vanquish the dubious honor of being Bard the Messiah,” I said. “And the charms of Kirsty McDevitt.”

“Those charms wear off eventually, don’t worry,” said Emery.

I gave him a shrewd look. He looked back at me, his face full of the rest of the story, the part he hadn’t told us.

“God,” said Karina. “This whole thing is so sad, but I’m kind of annoyed. I’m like, I can’t believe Hector fell for this floozy and her bullshit!” No one said anything. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” said June. “We can’t believe we fell for it either. But people do. Even very smart ones.”

“It’s just that this seems like it’s going to be so hard,” Karina said. “It’s going to take so much time and energy and money, and everyone in my family works hard, and we don’t have a lot to spare. It just pisses me off that Hector is making us do this, that’s all.”

“It’s all right to be angry,” said June.

Karina slitted her eyes and subsided.

“Where are you from?” I asked June.

“Originally? Coralville, Iowa, then I moved to Seattle after college, and that’s where I met Emery.”

“I’m from Muscatine,” I said.

“Go, Hawkeyes!” June said. I wanted to hug her.

In the car on the way back to Brooklyn, Karina said, “I frankly don’t believe that anyone can get sucked into a cult. You never would, I never would, and nothing can convince me otherwise. Those people are freaks, June and Emery. Hector’s a freak, they all are. This whole thing gives me a stomachache. I’m so pissed at Hector.”

“I understand,” I said.

“It just sucks,” she said. “I love him, he’s my brother, I want to help him, but there is so much else I could be doing, if I didn’t have to. And what about Mom? Will she help us if it means having to be in the same room with you? This family is such a fucking mess. You’re all idiots.”

“Hector’s not your responsibility,” I said. “Neither am I, and neither is your mother. Stop trying to take care of everyone. Why don’t you forget about the intervention? I can take it from here. I’ll talk to your mother.”

We turned onto the Pulaski Bridge just as the drawbridge began to rise. While we sat and waited for the boat to pass below, I rubbed Karina’s shoulder blades exactly as I had done when she was a little girl and had one of her sobbing fits. When the drawbridge was down again, she gave me a wet smile, put the car in gear, and followed the line of traffic over the bridge. As we came onto McGuinness Boulevard, back into Brooklyn, she said, “I’ll be okay. I just needed to have a meltdown. I can’t let Hector get all the attention.”

“Sibling rivalry never dies, does it.”

“You wouldn’t know; you’re an only child.”

We turned onto India Street. When we were a block away from the Astral, for a split second I remembered sitting in my old chair by the window with a pen and a pad of paper, sunlight or streetlight streaming in, everything cozy and quiet, Luz cooking and calling out an occasional question or comment, the clink of spatula against frying pan, the opening and closing of the oven. How lucky I had felt, all those years, to have that life. But now, in this idealized memory, for the first time, I noticed the clamp on my brain, the tamping-down of myself I had willingly undergone in order to give Luz what she wanted. I saw how castrated I had been, sitting in that chair, how meek, how boneless I had become, trying to reassure her, to convince her of my fealty. And I had failed, and she didn’t want me anymore. I couldn’t tell her anything, couldn’t argue. She already knew everything about me there was to know. There was nothing to argue against. It didn’t matter, really, whether I was innocent or guilty, true or adulterous, a genius or a retard. Nothing I could say or do would change her mind, because for once, her mind hadn’t made the decision, her heart had, and that was beyond argument. The marriage was over.

Karina pulled up in front of the Astral and waited for me to get out so she could drive herself back to Crown Heights. She looked like a wizened, careworn little elf.

“Are you all right, alone in that house all the way out there in Zululand?” I asked her.

“Dad!” she said. I loved to tease my politically correct daughter by pretending to be a clueless schmuck; she was used to it by now. “That’s so racist! Yes, I’m fine.”